How To Make Your Creativity Beat The Algorithm (Live Performance) - Dylan Gossett - #1155

People of the UK and Ireland, I'm coming to you live. Imagine that, me on stage in your city. Dublin is completely sold out, but everywhere else has got limited tickets left, and you can get yours now at Chris Williamson.live. This is a custom-built live show. I absolutely adore it. I've spent over your working on it. So, if you're a fan of everything modern wisdom, come and see me on stage. This October, around the UK and Ireland, Chris Williamson. Live. Leave me busy, keep these hands tremble in. Ain't it something like the weather? To try and mark my mind, I'll try to think of something clever. And keep me safe-spied. I'll take burning on the weekend, straight down 29, pass the cedars and believers, on a rain drive. When to get out of the city, I'll pass the smell of the bar. I'll wash the planes, go on by bed, in the sky, leave them scarred. Oh, do you believe in, 'cause I've been having trouble sleeping. The only thing I'm needing, somewhere I can't find. So, I'm headed back to Austin, when I close my eyes. If you only had my vision, and I'm fairly lame, I do, trying to focus words ahead. And now, when I please, take the simple kind of moment, to put my mind at ease, and take some girl you said she loves me, to make me wait in the name. That's fun. Oh, woo-hoo! Thank you, dude. Yeah, unbelievable. So good. Thank you very much. Great to see you. That uh, that one's about Austin. To exercise obviously. Very timely. Yeah. Did you write most of coal in 25 minutes? Is that right? Yeah, yeah. Coal was written one of the fastest ones I've probably written. Yeah. It uh, it started, I can kind of show you. So, it started just with, uh, maybe not this exact chord progression was a little bit different. I might have an old video that I could show you, but I think I almost, I think it has started with kind of that hook. You know, I was like, that's great. That's a song. We got to build around it and uh, then uh, yeah, verse by verse and it was just, I remember I was like, had my phone type in on top of our dog kennel in the apartment at the time. And it was like right before we went out with like some work friends. And none of my friends knew I sound, like at all. I didn't, I don't know, I just don't go around telling people. And uh, rote, rote coal went out and Julia, my wife, was just stoked on it. She was like, this is so sick. And she was just showing people like Snapchat videos of the song. She was like, you know, just, what do you all think about this? And they're like, Dylan, you sing and I was like, cats out of the bag, I guess. Uh, and then didn't do anything with it for like a year or two. No way. So you sat on that, you sat on a song that did like half a billion streams. Yeah. For example, I just, I wasn't, I wasn't, I wasn't on socials. Like I wasn't putting anything out. Uh, I, I didn't do anything until we were on a camping trip. Um, with my buddy, Kaden and his now wife, MK and my wife and I, Julia. And uh, I brought my guitar and was just playing some songs. And Kaden has like the best ear of anyone I know. He's like an A and R that's not, doesn't work in A and R. And he heard Cole and he's like, please sing it again. He's like, voice memoed it. And he's like, you got to do something. You have to do something. And my wife was like, Dylan, you should just post on TikTok. And I was like, well, I'm not, you know, I'm not a TikTok girl. I was like, I almost can't stand it. Like I don't, it's just not like, it's not my thing. Um, but yeah, I started doing it. And then Cole became this thing, which is insane. One of my buddies as best man is wedding, Godfather, it was kid and he was playing. We were at a friend's house who has a karaoke machine. And I don't even know why there was a guitar there. And he'd been doing exactly the same thing. I bullied him, bullied him. I was like, no, come on, come on. Because the choice was between him playing acoustic guitar with a beautiful voice. I'm one of our friend's sad emo wrapping. And I was like, hey, look, the decision is really easy for me to make in terms of the pressure. The fucking flaw, dude, is so low for you to get over here. Yeah, so I'm interested. Where were you in life when you were doing those lyrics? I was living in Austin. I worked in, are you talking about Cole? Yeah, yeah, Cole, I was living in Austin. I was working at the racetrack, the circuit of the Americas down here. So I was at the time. I was an event operations. I think I was, I was, I started as an intern. I used to live there in like a trailer in my parents RV for months. And I just lived at the job site. But I, yeah, I was working there. And I might have just kind of been through like a tough season. Like F1 season is just kind of brutal, especially for like the outside guys. You're just, I mean, it's just like 20 hour days that you're living out there when it's F1 time. I don't know, it's like that. It might have been some, you know, interpersonal family thing. You know, whatever it might have been at the time. And, you know, I always try to say like it's a, it's a pretty deep, kind of dark song. But I certainly tell people, I wasn't in like the worst spot of my life, you know. But I was just going through everyday struggles, you know, just like everybody does. That's kind of what it was. I was like, I was in a pit. I was like, I'm not going anywhere. It's not, I'm not really like, I don't know. I don't feel like I'm chasing anything right now. Like, I'm having a great life. I mean, my wife and our dog, we're having great, like, we're very happy. And I was like, but a lot of other stuff we were just like, you know, whatever. You know, so it's interesting. There's like an input, output equation. I think a lot of people feel. And if you're putting lots in the goal, the hope, is there something's going to come out on the other side of it? But you have this sort of latent leverage after a while. Like, you build up, you know, you pull back an elastic band and you pull it back and pull it back and pull it back and pull it back. And we hope that life is going to be a bit more linear. But a lot of the time, you're kind of just accumulating rap. So doing something, maybe not even doing what, and putting in more work than you will do in future and not seeing the rewards. I think that's why, you know, the top comment. Cole's got 22 million plays on YouTube. The top comment says, this song has the feeling when you're working on yourself and making progress, but you still feel lonely and like a failure. Yeah, honestly, that's a great way to put, like, that's how it felt, I guess, is like, it just felt like we were putting the hours in. Almost, you know, it's like, we're doing it, but I don't know. It's like, we don't, we don't feel any different. But now I almost see now, it's like without, like if Cole happened, let's say, let's say I was, you know, I was writing about other stuff and Cole happened five years earlier. No way. There's no way that I think I would be torn doing the same thing that we're doing right now. Because without, I think without going through that job and understanding even personal relationships outside of college, like just kind of real world items, like, I don't know. I feel like I can't even imagine being thrown into the music industry or trying to write songs or any of that. Without, I feel like having a real frame of reference to come back to. Does that make sense? Like, dude, even music as an artist, I think people don't understand. It is such a business. Like, I think people imagine artists and myself just being like, look, I strum the guitar, I show up shows. We collect our money and that's our lot. Like, that's, I feel, there's at times, I feel a lot more, like a business manager than an artist, for sure. There's a book called "The E-Meth Revisited" by. I think it's Michael Gerber, it's just a business book, but it's quite well done. And he tells this fictional story in there of a woman who runs a bakery and this woman loves making cakes, she loves to do, and she's made cakes for the family, and she makes cakes for her friends, and it's her passion, and she's rated it, and everyone's best cakes. I'm going to open a bakery, wouldn't that be cool? Small local bakery, so she opens a bakery, and then it gets popular because she makes great cakes, but she needs to hire some staff, and some staff come in, and the staff start to make some of the cakes, and she's involved in the ingredients and the recipes and the releases, but then it's accounts to do, and she grows a little bit more, and then she gets a factory, and you know, she's spending a little bit less time making cakes, and before she knows it, she hasn't made a fucking cake in years, and this, no matter what industry you're in, you have to learn to be able to say no to things, or to focus on stuff that previously would have begged to have had the opportunity to say yes to. I want to be in the room with the A&R person, or you're a writer, and you have all of the opportunities to go and do speaking cakes. It's like, why were you great as a writer? What made you great as a blogger on sub-stack, or as an author that writes books, or whatever it is? It was because of the time that you spent, like, stewing in your ideas, right? Like marinating in this stuff. It was the three hour walks that you took with the dog, and all of that time gets squeezed, because we can't see, basically, like, obvious productivity is really easy to track. How many hours did you spend on Slack today, or how many emails did you send? I've got a full back-to-back day of schedule calls. This must make me really important. And you go, "Well, how useful is it for you to go fishing for an afternoon with nothing else happening?" Well, I worked really hard today. I went fishing. The Puritan work ethic, the guilt that comes up, because I should be working harder, but that's not what necessarily got you here. No, and it's so strict, because, yeah, because, like, expectations change from everyone involved too, right? Like, the fans have different expectations to the listeners. I have a different expectation as myself, as I put up more and more albums. Back when I was writing Cole, I was not writing it for anything. I was just like, "This is my outlet. This is my passion. I love playing guitar. I'm just going to pick it up and write." I had no reason to do that, but I wanted to, because that was just what I was so passionate about, kind of like the baker, like she wants to make some fucking cakes. And now it's like three years, three and a half years later, or I guess from Cole writings, like five years, but looking back, like, if I wrote that exact same song today, and I, like, if I hear the version of Cole right now, I would be like, "What is this dim?" I would never put that out, you know? And it's like, I tried to remind myself, like, when I'm in the studio, because, like, that song was just made on my laptop, on the edge of my bed. Like, that's where Cole was recorded, when he heard the only thing I didn't do on that song was master, which actually, I put it out. We had to retake it down to remaster it, because it was so-- The levels were all over. Yeah, it was just off. It didn't blend in with other music. So, yeah, it's so strange, like, you have to, yeah, you've got to find that passion, which I still have it. And, like, I think, you know, obviously, I'm going to talk about the struggles of music, because there are some, but the last thing I'm going to be as ungrateful for what it is, like, I'm living my dream. Like, whenever I have struggles in this industry, because there are, kind of like you said, it's like four years ago, I would have killed to be stressing out about putting my album out. You know, "Oh, I have to go sign vinyls in Nashville." I would have died for that, dude. You know? So, I don't know. I just-- I have to remind myself that. My wife reminds me that all the time. She's just, like, my number one supporter, and just, the greatest teammate in the world. So, yeah, it's such-- just-- it's the goalposts just changed. Isn't it crazy? You know about habituation and hedonic treadmill, right? Like, you can't wait to get a new car. You spend all of your time thinking about this new car. You get the new car, and then after six months, you sort of bored of it. Yeah. Look, enough to the next one. What nobody really talks about is the same thing, but with goals and problems, that you wanted to have to do soundcheck. I just wish that I had a team of people who would maybe tune my fucking guitar before I go out there, and then you've got to negotiate because one of the fucking guitar techs has had to leave, so we need to get a new guitar tech. Hang on. So, you're telling me that the person I pleaded, like, begged, prayed to have, and now I need to get a replacement for, and that feels like a burden to me. Yeah. And we get accustomed to a different quality of life, a different, you know, level of ease or something. And yeah, I've always thought it would be really cool. If you could take photos of your own mind and go back and visit them like you come with a photograph, what would it be like to go back to the texture of your mind from four years ago? Even just plug it in. What problems? Yeah. What problems were you thinking about? What concerned you as you fell asleep? Money worries. I'm going to make fucking circuit of the America. I'm boiling hot on the fucking golf cart. Yeah. Can we do Vesco, a little, a little cold? Yeah, let's do it. Beautiful. Yeah. This was like the one, because you know what's funny, I posted a video of cold way early on and no one cared. It didn't do anything. But I was fine with that. I was like, I already stuck to it. I'm just going to keep posting. I didn't post cold. And again, until after to be free happened, the first song I ever put out because I was like, I have a little traction. I actually tried it. I was like, I really, really believe in the song, like the writing on it's really good. And then it was like, yeah, over like that video changed. Why did you do that in cold? Why did you do that pre-chorus? Because you don't drop like the line until the second time it comes around. Why did you make that creative decision? Two things. At the time when TikTok, I hated what music promotion was. I hated that it was like, okay, we're going to hear this 15 second clip of bad lyrics weren't even on the screen really at this time. People weren't like, I don't know, just like all about a 15 second clip that people can just repost and redo videos to dance or whatever it was. And what they would do is they would get all these pre-saves lined up, pre-save, and they would just extend this thing for just months. And what I did with cold was like, I think the strength of this song is in the writing. It's not necessary. I think the hook is like this huge payoff at the very end that the people who listen to it are going to get. At the time I wasn't thinking, oh, I should probably shave that off because a 22nd video is going to have a lot more views in a 45 second video like you're saying. But I also just like the writing of it. I don't know, I've seen heaven without dying with the devil without trying. I was super proud of that. And I was like, I think that's a good hook to bring. Who knows? If I started with the chorus, it might have never happened. If it was a dark sky instead of a sunny day when I was recording, it might have never happened. Like I think about that stuff all the time. I did like five different videos that day and I just chose that one. I was like, there's a chance that that video didn't go. I never posted cold again. And we're not having this conversation. You know what I mean? So it's, yeah, I don't know. I also like, I'm a big believer in that things happen for a reason. So that also gives me peace of mind. I don't know. But yeah. So. And I think when this game life plays heavy on my heart and love is tough. Loneliness twice is hard. I'm carried out about everywhere I go. They say pressure makes diamonds hell and I still cold. So good. So I mean, do you think deliberately looking unpolished is now its own kind of marketing? Because as soon as you find, as soon as somebody does it on the deck and it's successful, like everything becomes commercialized, like authenticity is really difficult to survive once a team recognizes it's got commercial value. And then that kind of kills what authenticity is because people are now performing authenticity. Yeah. I mean, so that was something, I mean, it's honestly, it's still some I obsess over of like, and I don't obsess over it in a way of like, how do we make this look and feel, you know, because people are smarter than they ever are. Like dude, you're not going to fake it. And people do. And maybe I'm wrong. You know, maybe people do believe a lot of self-asalt ending when it's just absolutely not. But I don't know. I just feel like I try to stay true to what my mind was thinking when I first got into this thing of like, there's lines I won't cross. Like what like, I would never sacrifice for a while. I wouldn't even run ads. I wouldn't do anything. I would not. And I drove my team crazy. And I guarantee I probably took a hit on a lot of things for that. And maybe I was overthinking it, but I was just like, look, I just, I don't want to just all the sudden. Like you said, it's like, we know this thing works. I don't want to all the sudden just dive in. Everyone's telling me, we'll wait. That's the formula. Yeah. Here's the formula. Don't post it. Don't put it out right now. Wait three months. Get your pre saves up. Post it 30 more times. I posted a call in total. Even like today, I think it's been like seven to 10 times ever. You're kidding. Ever. Now when it came out, I think I posted it four times. And And what people would tell you now is like, "No, you gotta post that song 50 times." You know, and it's like, it's just such this weird thing in music right now where there's so many people doing it. So like, you've gotta get out there somehow and you've gotta separate yourself somehow. It's even 10X of whenever I like Cole came out of like the amount of people kind of playing this type of music. And I don't know. I really don't have the answer to like how to separate 'cause everyone's doing the authentic thing now when everyone's doing the polished thing. Like, there's just so many things. And I think in your world and in my world, the ends of the barbell are where people are succeeding. So very, very produced, right? Like super, super polished or very roaring strep back. And I think the middle is where people seem to go to die at the moment. But looking at talking about the growth of the music industry, Billboard Top 10 from 2020 to 2023, rap music 34%, country music 7%, 25 to 26, country music 27%, rap music 17%, so rap music's gone in half and country music's 4X. - That's incredible. - That's pretty crazy. Yeah, I mean, wild. I think it's the natural way of things. Like I think at some point, country will be back down and rap will be back up. Again, that's five. - That's the two ends of the. - You know what I'm saying? - Yeah, but also like, country is not what country was in 2020. Like, I mean, I hear songs right now that are charting or whatever, that I'm like, that's a great song. I love it. I would call it country, but sure, you know, you know, it's got acoustic guitar in it. Let's do it. That's country. But yeah, it's cool. I think at some point it'll go back. There'll be like a whole new wave of hip hop or something that comes in, which is cool too. 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Right now, you can get up to $350 off the Pod6 by going to the link in the description below, aheading to eightsleep.com/modernwisdom and using the code modernwisdom. A checkout that's e-i-g-h-t sleep.com/modernwisdom and modernwisdom. A checkout. What's interesting is how virality can reward different behaviors, because as soon as you find a way to make something become effective, everybody's going to start to play that. I guess, how do you tell the difference between a song that's good and a song that's just algorithm-friendly? Ooh. I mean, I feel like I have a bad view on this because I'm in it. So I feel like I can pretty easily see when something has something pushing it. You know, I kind of know what the markers are of when I hear a song that's trending, and I'll go look at the audio or whatever. And I'm like, okay, they got a team. They're running this thing. What is some of the indications? Like, okay, you'll see a song come out and there's a thousand truck edits to it or something. And I'm like, what's a truck at it? I'm like, okay, you'll see a new song come out and it'll be like a video of an account that all they do is just truck videos with cool, moody lighting, lyrics on the top, and they put a song to it. I didn't realize this was an ecosystem on Instagram. Oh, it's not just truck. It's not just truck. There's truck, Instagram, Instagram, Instagram. Yeah, that's a big thing. Right. And again, it's just a smart thing, 'cause a lot of people follow those accounts for music. Like what teams will do is, you know, they'll pump someone's song on stuff like that. Now, I'll say now more than ever, that doesn't mean that you're gonna have a hit song. It might put more ears on it, but like if the song is not that great and if it kind of sounds like something else, like it just won't, it still won't really catch. But, you know, this is the kind of escalation of firepower when it comes to marketing, that how much harder is it to break through if every moderately good song has now got an army of clippers and truck edits and boat edits behind it? So, yeah, that's, I mean, that's what I mean, is almost like in my case, right? Like I'm very blessed to be in the position that I am is like selling tickets. That's what we've always based this thing off of. Like we've never really, outside of coal, we've never really had like viral moments. Like that was it. Like we haven't really had one since before it. But what matters to me is that our shows keep growing. Like that's all I've always cared about is like getting people to buy tickets in seats. And, I mean, even that's getting harder with just how many, everyone in the mom is touring right now, but it's a-- - Lou Dot Fever is happening. - Yeah, and that's just like, that's a whole other crazy thing. That's just like, that is a mixture of just everything going against people buying tickets. So like, but then, you know, part of the rate for the people that don't know Lou Dot Fever is a wave of artists, many of whom are pretty big, doing some pretty large venues, some stadiums, some arenas, not selling out, or often not selling enough to even maybe continue with the show or perhaps killing the tour entirely. And part of it is, is this person as relevant as they thought? Have they overcooked it, but another huge part of it is what are the fucking ticket prices? Like what's happening with ticket master and live nation, and how much are people getting squeezed in dynamic pricing? It's all cohesing at the same time, but one of the most common things I'm hearing on the show is how much real life events are gonna come back. Like, everyone's bullish as fuck on live music. Everyone's so bullish on comedy, on real world events, on, you know, slow phone tech-free Sabbaths, trying to touch grass and, you know, fucking see the sky again. And at the same time, you have this other force, which is cost of living. People don't have as much money as they want anymore. And live nation, and ticket master in every venue on the planet knows, okay, well, I've got a squeeze, but I can't squeeze too much. - Yeah, yeah, I mean, it's like, yeah, you wanna go see a massive stadium act, right? It's like cool, for me and my wife to go, that's going to be a four-figure day. Like, and that's if I'm in the nosebleeds, that's if I'm in the worst seat in the stadium, I gotta go get a hotel, I gotta park for $50. I gotta, if I wanna buy a shirt, - Baby said it. - Baby said it. I mean, you're talking about thousands of dollars to go see a show in a really bad seat - From Row F. - And then they go, well, hold on, this TikTok artist that remember, we have on our playlist, he's playing down the road for a $15 ticket, and there's 200 people going. And it's like, let's just do that. But there's 1,000 people now. So, to have, and I feel like agents jobs are getting harder every day too, 'cause it almost, like, you build touring off of like, sell outs, and coming back and revamping, like your show that you did after an album, you come back to the city, you crushed, and it's like, all right, well now you can do 20% more tickets 'cause your album's doing well, and people are enjoying it. So let's do it, but now it's almost at the point where it's like, oh, you know, Dylan's coming to Chicago. We saw him last year, great show, loved it. But we saw him, and what about this new artist that's coming, we should go see him, 'cause we can only choose one show this month, or this year 'cause everything's so expensive. So, it's just, yeah, dude, it's such an interesting landscape. Again, we're just, we're just very blessed we get to keep doing it. So that's what we should try to do. - Ovenite success used to be a bit of an insult, and now it kind of feels like what everyone's chasing. - Yeah, yeah. - That's strange. - Very strange, right? I also think a lot of people aren't ready for it. Maybe, like, I mean, I wasn't ready for it, but luckily, like, it didn't happen in such a way when I was too young, or like, you kind of happened, like in the perfect moment, like, my wife and I just got married six months earlier, like, they'll settle down, move into a house together, and then it happened, you know, and I, yeah, it, you know, I think the hardest part is maintaining it. I feel like that's what does not always happen. Is someone who'll have a really big moment, and you'll know the song, everyone in the world knows the song, and then in a year, it's like, they can't sell shows, 'cause maybe they just had that one song that was getting pushed out. I don't know, it's a weird world. I feel lost in it all the time. That's why I've deleted so much social media, any, like, country account out there, I pretty much just unfollowed. I just, it's just overwhelming. It's just too long. - What's the sensation that you feel when you get exposed to that, when you were getting exposed to that stuff? - Ah, I mean, my sensation, it's not like, I'm like, getting anxious or stressed about it. It's more of just like, do I gotta have a life outside of everything, Instagram used to be like, "Oh, what are my friends posting?" And now it's just like, ad promotion, promotion. Oh, there's my buddy, let me just go through that, and it just gets, or when people are reviewing other country artists, and it's like, these people that hide behind us, it's just weird. And I'm like, obviously, it's good for the music industry. It gives a lot of eyes, but as someone that's in the industry, it's like, I'm trying to separate a little bit my life in my work, which I feel like I've done a really great job on like again, I'm not. I'm not like very social media forward, I mean, we have an album coming out, so I've kind of been trying to post more, but I'm like, I don't know, I don't know, I don't, you know, it gets lost out there a lot of times anyways and it's just, it's just a lot. It's another element of what we were talking about before that, as you become successful your ability to do the things that made you successful become harder to access, in order for art to imitate life, you have to live a life, this is why comedians, as they get bigger and bigger, all of their acts are about airports and dinners and shows and hotels, because that's all that they know, because they're now a big touring act every single weekend they're away playing two or three shows, maybe they're matineeing and all of their friends are in their industry as well, and before you know, you go, what is the wellspring I'm drawing from, and this is the same for anybody, you're a marketer, right, you're a branding person, you're trying to come up with really interesting insight for a new campaign for a client that you work for, for your own company that you run or whatever, where are you drawing that from, if all that you're consuming is just derivative work of other people talking about the same thing, well, I'm big in the branding industry, it's very important that I spend time at the conference, okay, so you as a marketing guy, spend all of your time talking to marketing guys about marketing, where is the new inspiration from? And it's like, yeah, who you used to be the person that you would market to, like I used to be the guy that I would want to be like, I want, I would want Dylan to be a fan of Dylan, right, I'm trying to, I'm like, I think this guy will have the same thing with the show. Yeah, and that is like, again, like you said earlier, how can you tell what's a good song and what something's been pushed, I'm like, I think I can tell, but you might have been finessed as well. Yeah, maybe I have, because you know, and then I start to believe certain things, right, where again, like you just kind of keep pushing the line back of like, oh, I hate, I don't like how they promoted that or whatever. And then your next record comes out and you're like, well, you know, do we need to play that? Yeah, I don't know. It's a, it's, that's such a good way to put it, I've just, yeah, the farther, I guess you could say, quote, unquote, the most successful, successful you get in the more away from where you started, yeah, you got to find time to get back. I think Miley Cyrus might have said that one time interview was just like, she requires certain time off the road so she can just, just live, like just off, she's like, I just have to live a little bit. So, yeah. When does your process usually start? Is it like a line, a melody, an emotion? It'll be, it'll be stuff, like, okay, like, I don't know, I'll be on the couch, Julia will be watching TV or something like that, we'll be watching something and I sing gibberish. Like, I'll try to find a melody that I think is, but I'm not saying anything and eventually maybe like a word will come to me that feels very thought provoking or something. You know, like, okay, for like headed back to Austin when I played earlier, I think he was kind of that line. Like, I knew where I wanted to go, but I didn't have anything. And that just started, with, again, me on the couch for like 30 minutes, not because I'm trying to write a song, but it's because I'm just noodle it, like, I don't know, I just like doing it. So, I start just, toward, and I'll look at Julia, like, that sounds cool, she's like, yeah, I like that. And then you just kind of start gibberish forming consonants and vowels until they become a word. Hang on. So, the, the right is room is you, whatever bullshit's on TV, the white presumably now the kid, who's just like flailing in the background, right? So the difference between this, this and a Nashville engine, a little bit different. Yeah. But that's why I like, and again, I have nothing against those guys, they're very talented in their own. It's incredible what they can do, but it just doesn't. I can't do it. That's like I said, have you tried, have you tried to be in the, like, the engine, like that? No. I've, the closest I've come to that is like, I'll write with my brother, are like multi-instrumental is Colton, and even then it's just different. It's a whole different way of writing. I can't say if I like it more or less, like, I still think, just me on my couch, in my living room, usually at night, is like, that's where I get the stuff I like, like, but then like, my brother has a song that he wrote called Ramblin, and it's on the album, and it's actually the title of the album, Ramblin. And it's like one of the best songs on the album. Like, it's written so cool, and all I did was write like the chorus and a little like melody for the chorus. Can I hear it? Yeah. Uh, she's way better at playing it on guitar, so I'm probably gonna butcher it. So I haven't played it so long. Jeez. Listen to the wind, calls me by name, same old dirt from where I was raised, ain't no no, listen to the wind, listen to the wind, no, listen to the wind, it calls me by name. Like I don't know, it's so cool. It's a beautiful song. I butchered it, sorry, but like he's probably listening, he's like, you messing up my song about it. But yeah, no, he does this like finger-picking style that like, I just can't even do. Because he's a way better guitar player than I am. But um, this is so cool, like that's the stuff that I love, like I'm not, I was early on, but especially like now, like I'm very open to collaboration, and I'm not as like sacred about every word it's gotta be not. Like I, you know, I'm very writing is my passion almost more than singing. So like, you know, I'm very particular of like what I want the songs to say and sound like, and I don't know, I just like, I like writing. Would you ever do it to someone else? I think so, but it's maybe. I don't think I could write, I don't think I could write a song for someone else that I think that I could sing because I'll just want to sing it. 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Right now, you get up to 35% of your first subscription and that 30-day money-back guarantee by going to the link in the description below, heading to livemomentus.com/modernwisdom and using the code "modernwisdom" at [email protected]/modernwisdom and modernwisdom. Check out. Well, I had to belly in on the show last year, and he's just so fucking, I mean, there was a guitar on the back side of the room and I'm thinking, okay, John, motherfucking belly in. Okay? Right? I gestured to a guitar. Yeah, you know, explain how he did. He looked at it. I don't know. I played that thing. Yeah, I was like, I fucking, it's not my bag. Yeah. I'm just here to do the thing. Yeah. But he was telling me about how he'd taken all of his time off, five years maybe, this big break away from producing any, publishing any music himself. And he just wasn't first. Yeah. He'd had this altercation, pretty public altercation, I think, with his label. Didn't want to, I'm not going to play the game. I'm just going to make music for other people and this would be great. And he's just creating banger after banger. And so, well, how did you know that you wanted to get back into making music again? He said, well, when I had my stack of tracks to show whichever artist was coming in, like little demos and stuff that I'd cut together for them to have a little listen to, I'd find myself, you know, going down, going down. And then I'd double tap over the top of a couple of them and he was like, that one's for me. And he could hear in the back of his mind this bit of almost kind of a selfishness, or maybe a bit more swagger or kind of ownership coming back in because he wanted to do that. And I think about a lot of my friends that are writers, you know, they do versions of ghost writing for people and they'll shape ideas and then sometimes they'll come up with the synthesis of an idea and every so often they put out one, they feel a little bit aggrieved that they didn't get to put it under their own name and the same goes for comedy writers. You know, all of the roasts that you see, every big roast that you see online, a lot of comedians now are opening up in the caption of their Instagram post if they put one of these huge, big, like, you know, clips up to completely reps. They put the credits in that of all of the writers that have done to be in it. It's not that I'm right here, right, Jared? Like this is because I always thought it was like, I always thought it was like rap and comedy. Like the country was like the country and pop were like, they had writers. Right. Yeah. I thought like, I thought like rap comedy was more like, you are what you write. No. I mean, what percentage of comedians now touring comedians do you think are using? What's off the top of your head? What percentage of touring comedians do you think are doing their entire sets? Less than 10 percent? No way. Yeah. That is crazy. At the roasts, I would probably guess probably less than. It's fucking armies of people to put this up. - Yeah, I mean, you even hear them call it out now, Shane at the SB's just gave a line and he said, "That wasn't mine, I didn't write that one." Like he's calling out the matter of the whole engine process. Yeah, I saw another roast that came out a couple of days ago and the fucking Instagram captions, 10 lines long. - It's crazy. - Like writers and then other contributors, it's got the dog in there, like everybody could say, "You could say the right is room." It's good, it's not Nashville credits, or else your kid would be like tapping you up, saying, "Hey, I was in the room when you were in the room." - Yeah, you were in my 33, yeah, yeah, dude, it's wow. Yeah, I don't know, I think what you said earlier, I take ownership and I try, I don't think I'm a very egotistical person, but the one thing I think I do like take pride in the most is probably the words. And it's just, I don't know, it also just, if somebody, I'm trying to think, like if someone came up to me with just an absolutely amazing song, and I was like, "Do you want to sing this?" I've never had that, I've never had that. Except for Blake, my brother, with Ramblin. And I was like, "That's no brand new, let's put that on the album." - Maybe it feels a little different than it's come from SoCo's own. - Yeah, and I guess, mate, or even, or even if it's a person that's just like a really great song, I'm like, "I have this song when you sing it." I'm like, "Cool, I can't, you know, let's do it, "I'll do it, but what about In Reverse? "What about you writing to someone else?" - Again, I think it's the ownership thing, like I think, if I write a song, I think it's just so good. I almost get to the point where like, if I have a chorus and like a verse, and all I need is like a little bridge, and I'm almost like, I'm so, I'm sorry, like I really don't want to help with this. - Because you want to own it. - I want this to be like, yeah, I want to complete my thought. - So that's a really interesting point, and I've found this with writing that there is always, at least now in the world of writing, and maybe increasingly it's gonna start creeping in in the world of music, the contribution of AI. So I've got this idea that I'm playing with at the moment, everfriend, and he bumped into an ex of his a little while ago, and he made the decision that he didn't want to be in a relationship anymore, a good while back, and he was certainly really done the work, spent a lot of time thinking about whether or not he wanted to leave, decided to leave. So her gets completely knocked sideways, just bumps into her randomly, and his head's in a whole spin, and he was saying, I can't work out how I was so certain at the time, and so regretful now. And there's an idea from psychology that's called the fading affect bias, and what it says is that bad memories fade with time, but good ones don't tend to, and that's great, because it means we have a psychological immune system. It protects us from being still at the mercy of some horrible thing that happened in our past. Your dog dies when you're 10, but when you're 15, it doesn't sting quite so much. Hooray for that, right? You have a psychological immune system, you distance yourself, you distract yourself, you have reframes, tragedy plus time equals comedy, is about as close to an algorithm that psychology's got. So bad things fade with time, good things tend not to so much, and in fact, sometimes bad things can kind of become funny, right, you can have a tragic situation that becomes funny in future. But one of the weird side effects of this, as you get a little bit older, is that you assume wisdom compounds with age. As I get older, I know more. But in matters of emotion, as you get older, you're just further from the evidence. Yeah, yeah. So what he had encountered was a situation where a future version of him had less information than a previous version of him. The person that was closer to the emotion understood what it felt like to not fully be in this relationship to be uncertain, to be sad on the couch and not have anything to talk about, to always be going to bed worried about whether or not who's making the right decision. And the version of him now isn't more experienced that further from the evidence. And I was like, fuck, I love the fading affect bias. I've got this story from a friend, sending this like series of texts. And I was like, trust that the previous version of you was stewarding the future version of you appropriately. Like do you trust that you had your best interest in mind? - Yeah, that's great. - At the time. And I've been fucking fighting with this idea for ages. And yesterday is my writing day, we're a Sunday's writing day, so I'm sitting down and I've got, fucking, a thousand, and it only needs to be 500 words. It needs to be short little essay, snappy. That's basically what I've just said, a little bit more formed. And I've got a thousand, 2000 words of just like bullshit. And I'm like, I can throw this into chat GPT, put it on deep research and it'll take my words and it'll put them together, put them into a flow. Maybe it'll tell me a story about Charles Darwin and it'll be done. - Yeah. - And I knew that if I did that, I would get the essay out today. It didn't put Shock Harrow for the people that subscribed to the newsletter. It didn't go out today. It was something else, I put something else up that was easier for me to write. The reason that I didn't do it was that that idea will be concretized for the rest of time. That will be the reference that I use for whatever the name is I come up with or the story, the way that it's formed, the examples I use, and they stick in my mind. And I'll always know that it wasn't me that did it. I'll always know that it wasn't me that put the fucking finishing garnish on the dish, that it all of the hard work and there was this bit at the end and I wonder whether that might be ego. I think it probably could be ego that enough. - But I also think it's like this. It's this, you see where the world is going a little bit with it. I mean, you can't even open your phone without it just begging to be like, let me do it for you. It can't even, like someone will email you, I haven't even read it. - You don't mean to respond to it on your behalf. - Yeah, I had to turn it off on my phone. It was like summarizing my messages. And I'm like, what, I'm just gonna read it. Like, hey, I got an email reply. How about this reply? And this is whole reply. And I think we're in a state, at least I am. I am, it's like this yearning to be like, it's so great to work your mind. You have to try to work your mind. 'Cause dude, I feel like there's days that go by when I'm on tour, I'm on autopilot. I'm not doing anything beneficial. I get tired, I'm just on my phone. I'm doing scrolling, and I'm like, I'm getting down more by the day. Like I'm not getting cognitively fast. - Yeah, yeah, and I'm not exercising my mind. Like I'm not trying to make it this big thing. I'm like, you know, God exercise my, whatever. But yeah, I think I just yearn for having that stamp. And like, it's such an accomplishment. Growing up as a kid, that's why so many people are against participation trophies, right? Like I'm in there myself, it's like against it. I've just, there's not a better feeling than when you do get it on the win. Earn the win instead of being like, we're all winners. It's like, no, you wrote a bad song, it's bad. But I promise, in two years, when you write that song, and you know you did it, and you crushed it, and you put it online, and people resonate with it. And you think that they're just resonated with it 'cause it's a different, no, it's because you failed and failed and failed. You made the right song. And dad is like, dad's the whole, I don't know, I think that's almost just the point of everything. Like it's the payoff. Like if you just write AI the rest of your life, like there's, I don't know, there's no, there's no like highs and lows in that. You're just very, yeah, I don't know. There's a line from Mark Manson that I've been fucking obsessed with this year, and it speaks to this AI thing. Do hard shit, not because it's fun, but because the win actually means something. You bled for it, you broke for it, you earned it. Easy wins are forgettable. Hard ones change you. That's the point. It's like that's everything. And the more that I think about that line, easy wins are forgettable. Hard ones change you, that's the point. - Yeah. - I'm like, oh, that's the choice that everybody's gonna make when it comes to AI. And it's gonna be in small ways as well. I've got to write a letter, a thank you letter to somebody saying, I really appreciate you taking care of the kids this weekend or the dog walker on her birthday or whatever. Like, do people care about receiving a card or do they care about the fact that you went to the effort of having to write it by hand? It's one of the strange things about, I don't know whether you guys have got moon pig or magpie, they're like a card sending services, but you sort of type in what you want. And it's very nice to receive a card. Like it's kind of right to receive a card. - Very. - It's at least twice as nice when it's been written by hand. - Oh, as opposed to something that's got printed off on the internet, somebody typed it in and it got shipped to your door. It's like, no, go to the fucking post office. 'Cause yeah, it's not like I receive a letter in the mail. And I'm like, this 2.99 piece of paper is what I've been looking for. No, it's like, okay, they put it in. They're just showing you love from afar because they can't, they're showing you ever from afar. So yeah, it's like, and again, I'm not saying that AI doesn't have its place in certain parts of the world. Like obviously, I mean, it's just technological advance. Like for example, I don't, I don't go hand-washed my clothes and hang them up on the clothesline. - Yeah, but I'm not showing ever. I'm like, yeah, I'm like, I got to live hard, you know? 'Cause obviously we advance, but there comes a line where it's like, all right, yeah, I can, I can, especially I think where the line crosses for me is when it's like artistic or sentimental, right? Or I'm sure there's other stuff, but artistic, it's like the whole point of art is that it's not perfect and it feels like something only humans can do, right? So it feels very natural. And then with the sentimental stuff, that's the whole point of, like you said, writing a letter. I'm not writing you a letter just so you can have the piece of paper, I'm writing you a letter and putting something in here that I think is gonna have an emotional effect on you, just like I'm having an emotional effect writing it. And I'm doing it, and I'm not like saying that writing a letter is hard, but I don't know. I think we're saying the same thing. It's harder than putting the prompt into chat GPT and getting it to do it. It's better than just checking the box. this episode. So it's brought to you by Woop. Most people treat recovery like it's optional, but unlike politicians, data doesn't lie. How you recover is literally going to determine how good your next day is going to be. Woop tracks all of it. Sleep, strain, heart rate, recovery. It's like, dog the bounty hunter, but instead of criminals, it's tracking down your bad habits. All of this data gets pulled into a dashboard that actually tells you what to do with the information. 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And it's weird because do hard things is kind of this tagline that everybody likes to lean into of the 4.30 a.m. cold plunge and the runs and the weightlifting and the sticking to your diet. But the decision of do I want to do the harder thing or the easier thing is going to encroach into every area of life, it's going to encroach into whether or not you want to. If you one click order flowers that goes to your Mrs.'s door because she's having a hard day or if you drive to the fucking florist and pick them up and hand deliver them to you, there is just a explicit real world difference, a tangible difference between those two things. But as things convenience begins to encroach on the rest of life, everybody is going to have to make that decision for more and more and more stuff. Oh yeah, you're just saying it's not, I saw this one picture where it was like, it started as, sit down restaurant, it turned into drive through and now it's Uber Eats, it was movies and then it's YouTube and now it's YouTube shorts, it just keeps going, yeah, it just keeps expanding. It's derivative, it becomes distilled down. And it's like, even, I mean, I find myself, I used to never do this, but I found myself literally this week of, I was watching Instagram, and I was watching it and I was like, let me hold down. Let me go times two speed here. You know, I'm like, what am I doing? I just, I need to, I need to speed fuck myself, but it's like you're saying it's not just that. That might not be the bad thing. I don't know, maybe you're on a bathroom break and you're like, I don't know, get to the point. You know, I get that, but it starts creeping into everything because yeah, 20 years down the road, you know, with the musician and they're like, all right, I got to pay the bills. We need a new song. I just don't have it in me. Write a song. Yeah. It's pretty good. It's going to sell. Like what's stopping people from doing that if it's just every year, it's just one extra thing, you know? Well, I'll say, you know, think about how songs are recorded now, you're going to a studio. You can play a song like pluck by pluck and just chop that together and then you've got the perfect take, the perfect take, whereas it would have been what 50 years ago, a single fucking room. Okay, yeah, because they are also on tape. So they, I mean, they, they legitimately had to make a decision right there in the moment and say, hey, either we're run out of tape or hey, it's literally not worth our time to go. They have like exacto knives. They would have to cut these things together, splice it physically, tape it up, run at the machine, like it's in now, it's just, yeah, just hit it again, you're fine. So that's why you hear on Sony's old records, like an Elton John record or something like that. You'll hear like in the background something like a hat fell on the keys, but it was a great take. And they're like, we can't keep the hat in, keep it, like you'll hear like the little key hit, like, you know, and then just keep it in there and it kind of gives records life a little bit like there's, there's certain things like I think in the records that I make, I think like my, I think the imperfections almost make it perfect sometimes. And it's just, you know, as soon as you say imperfections give something a degree of life, the imperfections then begin to be engineered, everything becomes marketable, right? The authenticity, the stripbackness, whoa, oh, this great story about Elton John, we must have a hat. Has anyone got a hat in the room? We can make the hat fall at the right time. It's very, so okay, and look, whoever's listening to this, I don't know if any Nashville producers listen to this. I'm probably not talking about you. I've had a lot of great experiences in the whole natural way. But there are a lot of that, a lot in that setting that it's very performative. Like you said, it's very, it's like they want it to be natural so bad that they're going to make it natural. Like it's going to be-- And you need it naturally. Artificially natural, like you're saying. Artificially natural. And it's like, what's the craziest thing? Get your car keys and you know, that's how they did it. You know, and that's how they did it on whatever it's called and no, we need to be living in them. And I'm like, I think it's just this sort of commodification of everything. And as if it's less gate-capped by technology or by expertise, it means that more people are going to be tempted to do it. The problem is going to be, can we remove drudgery from people's lives without taking away the stuff that actually matters to them, without taking away not just like you want to be involved in this thing, but it is genuinely better for you to take a longer route round, to take a higher friction route from where you are to the outcome of this thing because it's going to be better for you. Maybe the work will be worse, but the win will mean something, it won't be as forgettable. You know, it's strange, I guess it's weird in music because for such a long time there's been teams of writers and bands even say, okay, so you said the lyric and maybe the fucking guy that wrote the lyrics left, it's like a 10-year-old song, right? And the guy, maybe he's dead, you know, he's not even a part of the band anymore, but we're still singing it and it's ours, we get to own it, so there's been more fluidity, but that also I think means it could be a slippery slope. Oh yeah, mastering, fucking, you must be able to one-click master track, not as well as a elite audio engineer now I'm guessing, but you must be able to one-click master tracks now with it. For sure. I mean, and again, like some of it is good, so I want to say, like I want to be, it's important I say that some of it is good because there's also a lot less gatekeepers nowadays in music. It is so sick that I can write a song called like Cole that I believe in and I can record it on my laptop, I put it out and it does better than 99% of all the money pushed multi-song writer songs. I love it. That's awesome. I love it. That's great. I think that's a great side of like entry access, because it's democratized it so that you can compete. Exactly. But you're right, like it's a slippery, because as soon as the people go, that works. Hold on. That's like, hold on. We're the million. That's fucking, let's, let's, let's gossip A.I. How do I make? Yeah. Dude, but it's like, that works. It's only a matter of time. That's the thing. Maybe that's what I'm trying to get. I don't know what I'm trying to say like booty click. Everything that's good. It's all, you know. Yeah. But it kind of feels like that like in, in the industry, there are thousands of people working every single day to find the next new thing. Yeah. So when you have something like Cole or something like, I don't know anyone else in this industry that has a song, people are going to be like, what did they do? Why did it work? How do we replicate it? Yeah. And how do we dump a truckload of money behind it and just make it happen? Did you see that, was it a variety piece about geese, you know, that band geese? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I didn't see the piece we're in about it. It was like a big article about how the engine, the clipping engine and stuff was behind that band. I think the band were pretty successful beforehand and then it's just, you know, you really put the fucking fuel nitrous boost about not. Okay. Between, where was this song originated? Who wrote the lyrics? Because is it an AI song? If AI helped you to craft the lyrics and then you sang them? I think so. What about is, but my point is like at what point, how far back do you go? Okay. So I'm really struggling with Rhyme's block that's, it's an app for iPhone. I'm really struggling with a word that rhymes with small but fits this. Oh, I'll just go in. It's like, yeah. Behind, where do you draw the line? I do. That's a great question. And as technology begins to democratize it, the only place that you have this, that you can make this decision is my own kind of moral gauge for what I want on the other side of it. Yeah. I think, I do, I mean, there's a great area, but I think it's one of those things where it's like, you know, you know what I'm saying? It's one of the, like, I feel like the Ick radar. Yeah. It's, I mean, I, I even, it's, I'm not trying to get like too deep, but I think this goes with a lot of things. I think there are people that are just going to always push the envelope of be like, well, what am I, what am I allowed to do? Like always trying to be like, how much wrong can I do before I get in trouble? And I try not to look it at that way. I try to be like, you don't want to moralize it. Yeah. There's, I just like, I don't have, I don't, I don't think I have that thing in me where I'm like, how, how, how much can I squeeze out of this with AI to help me write this song without people thinking that it's AI? And it's like, I think if you're doing that, like you know what you're doing. But I think if you're a kid at home and you're trying to like, you wrote this song and you're like, dang, what's that word? Open up the dictionary, open up like a rhyming website or something and you find like, oh, cool. That kid has no intention of being like, you know. - Oh, this fucking wud was written by you. - Yeah, like that's his song. You know, I, because he's, I don't think that that's something like that's pushing you off. Like, I don't know. I don't know how to like, word this correctly, but I just think, I think you know, you know. Like if, or do I mean, like there's also the debate about, you know, producers and mixers and engineers and stuff like you said, like, what if they use AI to kind of like help them with the sidechains really hard? - Yeah, and it's like, yeah, okay. You know, as long as the argument, you know. Hey, there's an argument to be made that as soon as you've got doors and you're like, hey, back in the day, dude, we have to take a fucking lead, take it out of that synth, put it into that. So you want to chain those things together, go and get you, go and get your quality. - Yeah, it's like, is Lee's an electric piano, you know. So yeah, again, I think it comes down to like, you just know what you're got. Like, you're, you're either making music or something else is making the music for you to take. And it's like, I don't know. - It seems like you take a very sort of emotionally informed approach to music. It's quite self-deprecating, sort of a stock. - Sometimes, I think, is that fair? - Yeah, I think it kind of depends. Like, you know, I also think it really changes the mood of this song itself. Like, I don't know. I find those songs can be easier to write. I feel like when I write my happy songs, they come off cheesier when I feel like it's the same level of lyrical writing. Dude, and it's also, yeah, it also, if I put, if I put coal on like an EDM track, I guarantee people would be like, they wouldn't really care about what the lyrical, it's like, it doesn't feel sad. It's like, have you seen, have you seen people that play like Ballad piano, like the Drake and Josh theme song? It sounds like a beautifully written song and you're like, it's kind of deep. Like, it's kind of a sad, you know, whatever, but it's like, it's all how it's framed. I think, I mean, I think of like Jason Isbeau when it comes to this, but if you put his type of lyricism into his type of guitar playing and his voice and the raspiness, like, it's gonna come off that way. Whether it's intention to be or not, or then you can go listen to like a turnpike song who I think is some of the best writers in the world, but maybe they're four on the floor and it's kind of a more upbeat groove, but he's talking about how like, my dad's gonna, what my ass, I remember back in this county, like it might be a sad feeling song or whatever it is, that I'm not trying to say that song specifically, but and it feels upbeat, you're like, oh, I can get down and this is party, you know, it's a good time. So I figured the lyrical remember. Yeah, I think it's, yeah, I think it's sometimes the way that it's played on the guitar, you're playing different minor chords and stuff like that. But I like to lean into that, like, I feel like, I love listening to music like that. Even when I'm like happy, I'll be, I'll be the happiest guy in the world and I'm like, let me put on a sad one. Let me put on a slow one. Why do you think male sadness is dominating modern country? I think, I think two things. I think for one, I think it's the only place where I feel like a lot of guys, a lot of males feel like they're allowed to talk about it, like without being, without, like for example, if I went up to like my buddies or in our group chat and said how I felt in coal, it would come off of like, I'd rather get it together, what are you talking about? But you put a country music behind it and it's like, dang, that's a beautiful song. I actually connect with that, but I'm not gonna like say I do, you know? It feels like it's guys, almost like a dude therapy session and I think that's why so many people write about it is that it connects really deeply. It almost like, it says the feelings at a lot of these dudes, I think feel, but they're like blue collar fells around. They're like, I'm not telling, I'm not telling nobody how I feel, but let you do. At our shows, the people who are heart and soul singing it out there in the crowd are the dudes. Arms run each other, I promise they would leave that show and they would never tell each other about their feelings, but they come to the show and they're looking at each other screaming these lyrics and it's like, yeah, it's like cathartic, it's like it's like a thing. So I think, I don't think it just comes off. Well, it's like the way to do it as a dude. But I wonder if it's still being cool. I wonder if it's a weird comment on masculinity that men feel comfortable seeing their emotions reflected in lyrics, but uncomfortable exposing them in daily life, like this guy has said this thing that I feel he's put words, so I'm happy to sing it. Yeah, I'm happy, I'm happy to sing it that his show. Yeah, and I'm still, it feels like there is room for that. It's a really interesting sort of balance between those two things. Yeah, and it almost feels like sometimes the opposite for women, like it almost feels like female songs are empowering and male songs are about vulnerability. Yeah, and it's the opposite to where it's like when women sing about vulnerability, it's almost like the male crowd is like, here we go. I know they're, you know, another female contrast talking about a breakup, but it's like when guys do it, it's like brother, you know, I got, so it is, it kind of feels like that's the male outlet sometimes, it's like through music, and then I feel like the girl outlet. Again, I'm not trying to be the guy speaking on behalf of all the women out there. I would never do that, but yeah, it kind of feels like it's the opposite where it's, you know. I thought, I don't know, maybe I'm wrong. I thought I sit in parks by Kelsey Ballerini was such a fascinating fucking concept for a song. I haven't heard that, dude. So it's her talking about a relationship that she used to be in, and she didn't go through with it because her partner wanted to have kids, and she wanted to focus on her career, and then a few years later she's sitting in the park on a weekend looking at this family playing with the kid, and she's asking, have I made a mistake? Have I made a choice that I can't reverse? Yeah. So I take my Lexapro and I puff on my vape and the albums due in March, and my next tour is coming up, and my friend's about to have a kid, and I'm worried, I'm worried, I miss this thing. And that was really like fucking raw. Like very, very complex. I guess maybe I might have missed the mark, 'cause also a pin house by Kelsey Ballerini, like that's also a great song, and it's like a kind of a better relationship. So yeah, maybe I'm wrong, but I just think that you're right. I think that especially a lot of the country music tropes, maybe that's the reason, maybe that's one of the reasons why, that if you hear a guy talking about vulnerability, it feels rarer, and it's now being done through this vehicle, which is music, and it's almost like the tortured hero, the only way that he can even open his heart is to do it to a chord, you know? It's like that's the excuse that's being given, but it's also a defense mechanism. It's a defense mechanism, because if guys aren't comfortable about talking about it normally, this frames it in an artistic and romantic way, they just create a little bit of distance. I don't actually need to show myself in the same way, as you said yourself. - And as I open up in the group chat, it's different to what's gonna happen if I open up in the song. What the kind of thing that blows my mind is how many guys would love to have that outlet, but answering a songwriter's, and how difficult it is to find something else, 'cause I think, yeah, writing songs may be poetry, but that's perhaps even more inaccessible than some sing a songwriter, essaying, micro-blogging, on sub-stack, and you can write in the third person, and that feels, that's probably a little bit more accessible, but fuck me, beyond that, it's like you're into the world of YouTube and conversations with a therapist. - I guess that might be the do's that come to those shows. - It's group therapy. - It's like, man, I can't sing it, but I'm gonna try and get in the car, or do it, or drink, and then talk to the buddies, like, you know? - If you're gonna spend an hour in the gym, you might as well look hot and feel comfortable while you're doing it, and honestly, who wants to be in the background of a TikTok is highlight reel dressed like a chump. 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That's gym.sh/modernwisdom and modernwisdom10. A checkout. What emotions have you found to be the hardest to write about? Ooh, probably, like happy, I think, and not in a way it's like, I mean, I can't write about being happy because I can, but I feel like it doesn't come off the tongue is easy as like a sadder, more heartfelt song. I feel like I can really paint that picture versus like when I'm singing a song, and maybe it'll be. I mean, like, happy. I don't mean, like, love. I feel like I can write really well about love. I feel like I can write about my wife like a lot. I have. I've written a ton of songs about her. And I feel like those are some of my favorites I've ever written. But I'm talking about just straight up, this one's gonna come in, come on in the bar. - Yeah. - Yeah. - Yeah, struggle with that. I don't know why. I think some people nail it, and I've just, I can't, it's not always there. - I mean, I spoke to Dan and Shay about this. Luke comes fucking unbelievable. Like got as much swagger as it's possible for a white guy to have. Like he's the blackest white guy I can think of. And, but when you think about that sort of arc over the last decade or so of his songwriting, you go from very sort of tortured, uncertain, tumultuous, it is crises. And now there's a bit of me that wants him to smoke some crack. Is it a bit of me that wants him to like have that friction again in life because things are going well. And my son misses me when I go away. But I do come back and like my dad's getting older and that's gonna be hard when it doesn't happen. And he's still fucking repinit. But how much harder you have to work to make a banging song when you don't have that friction in your life. - Yeah. You're almost beginning to concoct stories or you're hearing things that happen to other people or you know, confabulating ideas and tales of an imagined world, a different world that you could have lived in. But this is what I could have been. It's like your life's so good that you have to imagine one you don't have in order to be able to create. Because for some reason, people seem to resonate a lot with that pain and that vulnerability. And again, if art is imitating life and your life's going really fucking well, what are you gonna be singing about? - Yeah, what's your sad song? - Show me your pain. - Yeah, and again, I don't think it's the worst thing in the world too when people like, 'cause I also love being a storyteller. I love writing songs about like, I have a song called "Lonal Cowboy" which is about, you know, a guy going and getting cheated on, killing the guy and on the run. And I'm like, I never did that. But I think I love the storytelling aspect. And that comes from my thing kind of more like that western kind of swing old, like Marty Robbins, like the gunfighter ballad and everything. It's just like a whole album of just like, ballads written about like gunfighters and stuff like that. - So it's like fables. - Yeah, yeah, mythology. - But then there also gets to like, yeah, you start getting into what feels like you could be a real story. Obviously, no one thinks that I went and shot this guy and ran away. But you know, when I sing a song about, maybe a stranger that I see that I'm like, I'm just going to make up what I think his life is like and tell that story. I think that's also sick. I think that's really cool. Do you know what Jolene came from? The Dolly Parton song? - I don't know. Maybe I don't think so. - I'm pretty sure it's written about a bank teller, bank assistant that flirted with her husband. - That's cool. - She didn't use the name of the bank teller, but found a lady at a party who had the name Jolene and placed the name of the lady. Story came from a beautiful bank teller who with Dolly's husband, Carl Dean, shortly after they got married. Dolly said the woman was tall redhead and paid Carl love attention. Carl enjoyed the attention, Dolly joked. That he seemed to spend a lot of time in the bank for someone with so little money, became the seed for the song. It was more of a playful thing. The name Jolene came from a totally different person, an eight year old redheaded fan who asked Dolly for an autograph. She thought Jolene was such a beautiful name that she told the girl she was going to use. She wrote Jolene and I will always love you. That's not rich. I won't write, I will always love you. It was working nine to five. She didn't write, I will always love you. Did she? Yeah. Did she? Yeah, that's her song. That's her song. And then Whitney Houston saying it on, what was the movie? And then I think Dolly was, I think Dolly probably said like, that's your song now. Like it's, no, that was, yeah, that's Dolly's song. Jolene and I will always love you in the same day. Talk about crazy. Yeah, fuck you with your fucking 25 minute call. Yeah, yeah. Get on that lap. She's like, let me just write some of the two, two, absolute bangings. But yeah, again, you've concocted this story. You've taken one element from the other. Oh, and then I guess it was in, so Linda Ronstadt saying it, every song that ever she sings is just better. That's so cool. Whitney's record became the best song, one of the best selling singers of all time. 14 consecutive weeks at number one. Pretty sure that this is just being knocked off the top by Ella. Really? Yeah. Because it's Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey, who both had the 14 and I'm pretty sure that 15 is now. Ella. Yeah. It's crazy. Fucking wild. Good for her. That's, that's so sick. I wonder whether there's any emotions that you want to sing about, but you don't think that the market has an appetite for. Hmm. I mean, okay, here's a great example. And I know a lot of artists struggle with this. I'll play an acoustic song in my back porch. And I'll play it a certain way. But I know the studio is different. Studio version's different. It's got some drums. It has a little, you know, slide and I'll be in it. It's just kind of more upbeat. And then you'll put out that version. And everyone's like, just, just don't change it. Give me the porch. Give me the porch, you know. And it's like, I think you have to try to expand your sound. Like I was watching that Billy Joel documentary. So cool. By the way, if you haven't seen it, it's like five hours long. It's incredible. His life is just, it's what the heck. But he always made it a point to change the way his sound was. Bob Dylan did the same thing where you went to the new pork folk festival. And Erno was like, you know, get your harmonica out and he's like, I want to play an electric guitar. And it's, it's, uh, you feel like you don't want to get trapped in like your own throat. Like I'm not trying to get trapped in this like, I'm an acoustic guy. I'm going to sing about how hard my life is. And, but you also want to service the people who listen to your music the most. Like, you know, that's what they want. And it's like, yeah, it's, it's like, it's like, it's pushing pull things. So I feel like, like I've done the best job that I can. Like I don't really put too much pressure. I'm still making music that I love. I really not, I don't try to overthink it. But yeah, I know a lot of artists that fall into that thing where it's like, I want to put out different music, but I just know it's probably not going to do well. And if I do it, if I put out this song, I'll probably do it a lot better because that's what I'm known for. That's what people want to hear. You know the idea of audience capture, have you heard of that? So it's from my world's content creation, YouTube. You test the ground with a bunch of different content. Maybe you start to pick up a little bit of speed. And then you find something that hooks a bit. You start talking about politics, but you talk about it from a libertarian lens. And you're, you're sort of, you're maybe a bit more bombastic than you used to be. Yeah. Oh, wow. They like that. Oh, well, I've been rewarded for that. I'll go again and you get a bit more bombastic. Yeah. Before you know it, you're like peak Alex Jones, sort of shouting and screaming and, and doing the thing. And you begin to throw red meat to your audience and instead of creating what you want to create, you give them what you think they want. Yeah. The problem with it is that you can achieve success with it because you're basically taking audience feedback, which in some ways is important and good. Like movies screen test the versions, right? And they check how, what were people's reviews. Should we change this bit? This felt a bit slow. And that's a, you know, audience feedback is important. But if you're not careful, especially if you're doing something that's very iterative over time, your audience doesn't fall in love with you. They fall in love with your projection of what you think they want you to be. Yeah. And you're like, this weird reverse puppet thing where the audience has got their hand inside of you doing this. And reliably, every single person that I've seen do it, and there's a bunch of people that have done it in my world and probably tons and yours as well, every single person eventually has ended up resenting the audience because what happens is you can taught yourself into this weird shape that you think the audience has rewarded you for. And then if they don't like what you're doing anymore, you feel so aggrieved because you betrayed yourself for an audience that doesn't even want the act that you're playing. And it is so, it's so fucking reliable. So that's one side. That's audience capture. And then Ethan Strauss has got this fucking unbelievable post where he talks about criticism capture, which is the opposite side of it. So audience capture is this big term for a long time. People do what they think the audience wants. It's the musician who denies himself the move from acoustic to electronic or a total pivot in terms of singing style because he doesn't think that the audience is going to want it. Yeah. That's your audience capture. Action capture is behaving in a way to avoid criticism or front run it from your audience instead. So instead of acting out of encouraging desire, it's acting out of defending against hate. So what are people going to criticize me for doing most likely? And how do I front run that so that it doesn't happen? So you see this in the same way in my world, people start to caveat a lot before they say anything. Well, we must remember that they do this sort of land technology with this throat clearing thing beforehand, or in a different way, people sort of steam out of the gates really aggressively and they're super ardent and militant and they have no quarter given no, no, no. And that's another way to do it. They're sort of pushing people out. They're front running. They're complaint. They're either making themselves so inoffensive that they don't say anything so that they don't get criticized or they kind of shadow box this imaginary opponent who doesn't really exist in an attempt to scare off critics. So you see it's so fucking warping. It's just audience dynamics, reward and pain. are playing with these two levers in an attempt to try and get as much pleasure and as a little discomfort as possible. And it kind of leaves you on eggshells where you're just like, I don't know what to do. Yeah, and especially nowadays with social media, everything is so instant. They're like, I think that messes with artists quite a bit of just the most instant feedback you can have. You'll walk off a stage, you know, sit in the green room and you're getting tweets or, you know, or you're getting your stories off. And it's, yeah, you know, in with the phones. Yeah, I used to, I don't know. But if you say, Jerry, can you pull up that video? I want you to show you that there's two videos going back to back that I think are pretty interesting. There's this Morgan Wallen video that's flooding around at the moment, which is having a fucking huge stadium and someone saying the performance standard for male versus female artists is so different. That's closer to a military reenactment. Is so much, is that anyway? And then look at this pull that other video up, Jerry. Is it a take the cray one? Yeah, I mean, it is just an insane level of it's the most polished like, look at this. Oh, I'm going to dip myself in literal liquid gold. Oh my god, is it like actual, I'm sorry. I mean, that's like the whole like the coach Sheldon, like Justin Bieber, the night waiting for you to do. Oh, yeah, that's it. That's liquid gold. That's in the next set. We're doing that. That's the next time. Well, it's just, I mean, it's different. Like, I've been, I've been to a Morgan show. It also, like, the production is still crazy. Him himself might not be in his dance number, you know what I mean, but it needs to dance. I guess like, it's also, it's also this for each and see bias thing where people just, they just have to keep doing the next big thing and make it bigger, which like an entertainment, that's a good thing. Like, yeah, it's like, you should be challenged, but I mean, you go look at the female acts from like, I don't know, 1950 or even the male acts, like, everyone's on a microphone and just doing the same thing. Like, I don't know, but yeah, I guess when did that separation happen? Because I mean, we used to have like in-sync factory boys and they were doing full production. Like, when did it become? I mean, MGK is bringing it back. He's got full dance numbers on stage. She's got choreography. Yeah. But like, everything that's, everything that's new is now old, you know? Yeah. Oh, yeah, it's like, oh, they used to do that. That's cool. Let's bring that back. All right, dude, let round us out. What's your, give us a little something from the new album, whatever you like, the sound of? Well, play a playlist song called Closelon. Um, should I sing this one? Yeah, this one's good. I think this is going to be a single, maybe. I don't know. That's something you could do this afternoon. But no, but I do it on purpose. I, but this, this is what I'm talking about. Like, when I, I, yes, I could choose the singles and have it all in the calendar and rock it and just go, but I, I don't, again, I think this is something that I probably, I struggle with is kind of the system formula thing. I don't know. I would rather go like week by week or like, feel it out. I don't know. Yeah. I don't know. I think it's going to be a single. But again, I also, actually this, and I will, I'll sing it right after this, but this brings me back to a point that we were talking about earlier, uh, about like teasing music and crowdsourcing and being like, what song does better? Like, uh, there's a part of me that misses the way of like, when an artist puts out an album, you don't know what the songs are. They've not waterfall released five in a day. Yes. You don't know what the songs are in your stokes to dive in. Yeah. And I'm trying to play this middle ground of like, okay, business wise, yes, we should be teasing songs and, you know, getting people excited. And I'm not saying it's a bad thing. But there's a side of me that's like, they wouldn't be great just to give fans just 12 new songs that everyone can be excited for. And you have no idea what it sounds. It might be a whole new sound. Like, that's kind of what used to happen. Or like, I don't know. Like, I just think that side of it's cool. Like my favorite thing, I know I brought them up a lot, but turnpike when they dropped price for admission. They did no singles. All they did was put up a billboard in the middle of the desert. And was like, albums out in two weeks. I think that is so cool. Now, I'm not saying everyone can do that algorithmically might not be the most effective way to do it, but it's sick. But yeah, but that's where like as an artist, you have to kind of weigh your options between, you know, like we said earlier, like what's authentic? And at the end of the day, like, what is going to get people this music? Like, what's going to pay the bills and do, you know, there's a fine line. So, but anyways, this one's called Close Line. I haven't played this one in a while. I should, I'll remember. That's a no thing. I'm bad with lyrics, but. Oh, am I plugged in? Yeah, cool. I'm sleeping in and I'm going out. Try not to thank too much about you. Don't call me later when my lads are. I know just how you do. You call me once. Yeah, but go later in the morning. You'll be gone to your sin. 'Cause I know you're just gonna hang me out to drive so close to be left on that close line. Oh, sicky guess and toys left in this so hard of mine. Baby, I know you're just gonna hang me out, hang me out to drive so stopin' early, yeah, yeah, little lads, say that you're the reason. You used to tell me that I'm movin' too fast with your hand tied around my wrist. So, treat me like it was you here to go before you change your mind. Said I was nothin' to put a hope in soul lover and baby, maybe you'd be right. I know. You're just gonna hang me out to drive so close to be left on that close line. Baby, I know you're just gonna hang me out, hang me out to drive so stopin' early, yeah, yeah, little lads, now I know you're just gonna hang me out to drive so close to be left on that close line. And sicky guess and toys left in this so hard of mine. Baby, I know you're just gonna hang me out to drive so close to be left on that close line. Let's fucking go, delin' gossip ladies and gentlemen, dude, you're all, congratulations, new album's out one. September 25th, fuck yeah, so. Appreciate the heck out of you, man. Yeah, thanks for having me. All right, goodbye my beauties. Dude, that was a great time, brother.