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Although WWE is still running shows during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, some superstars are unwilling to risk their health and the health of their family by coming to work. The most prominent has been Roman Reigns, who dropped out of WrestleMania and hasn’t appeared on WWE TV since. We initially thought he made that choice because of his history with Leukemia, but he has since said it’s actually because of his newborn twins.

WWE has repeatedly said that nobody who chooses not to come to work during the pandemic will face negative consequences, although someone claiming to be an employee said otherwise in a complaint to local officials, and of course they’ve just been ignoring the existence of Roman Reigns.

Then there’s Sami Zayn. Zayn has long been something of a black sheep in WWE for frankly discussing his progressive political views, and he has also declined to come to work since WrestleMania, because of the pandemic. At Mania he defeated Daniel Bryan to retain the Intercontinental Championship, which he’d won in early March, but now WWE has taken the title off him in absentia.

On last night’s WWE Backstage, it was announced that the IC Title has been vacated because Zayn is “currently unable to defend it.” A new Intercontinental Champion will be crowned in a tournament that begins this Friday on Smackdown. No further details have been revealed about the structure of that tournament, but we’ll know soon enough.

As for Sami Zayn, we don’t know when he’ll be back, but hopefully he’ll at least get a shot against the new IC Title holder to regain the belt that was taken from him.

In January of this year, Future got the ball rolling on his new album when he and Drake dressed up as nine-to-fivers in the video for their collaboration “Life Is Good.” While fans got excited thinking that meant the duo would link up for a follow-up to their joint mixtape, What A Time To Be Alive, they weren’t exactly disappointed to learn that it was actually the first single from Future’s upcoming eighth studio album. Yesterday, Future revealed the title and release date of the album, High Off Life, and today, he’s shared the thematically appropriate cover art.

While the artwork for Future’s previous albums has involved high-concept approaches like hiding his face in clouds of smoke or dressing him up as a bandaged beast, this time around he takes a more stripped-down direction, with a simple black-and-white candid photo. Future’s arms are outstretched and blurred, suggesting he’s in the middle of some emphatic gestures, enjoying the moment. In other words, he’s high off life — rather than the usual array of pharmaceuticals he famously gave up. We’ll see if that results in a more personal, energetic album this Friday.

Check out the cover for Future’s forthcoming album, High Off Life, above.

High Off Life is due 5/15 on Epic Records.

The 1975 are gearing up to release their new album, Notes On A Conditional Form, in just a couple weeks now. They still have some previewing to do, though, as today, they shared their latest single, “Guys.”

On the song, Healy expresses his appreciation for his The 1975 bandmates, singing, “I was missing the guys / In my rented apartment / You would think I’d have realized / But I didn’t for quite sometime / Started wetting my eyes / ‘Cause I’m soft in that department / Right then I realized / You’re the love of my life.” He continues in the chorus, “The moment that we started a band / Was the best thing that ever happened / And I wish that we could do it again.”

Matty Healy discussed the song with Zane Lowe on Apple Music’s Beats 1, and he said the tune is about cutting through irony and allowing himself to be sentimental in a real way:

“I really love this song. […] It came quite late in the record and it was just quite easy because in its simplicity, it was easily executable, and [there is] quite an obvious emotional quality to it. […] I think I just wanted to write a love letter to friendship, as opposed to every love song being about our romantic relationships. I think that our friendships are obviously our most formative relationships. So, shout out to the homies.

It’s that whole thing of sincerity is scary that I’ve been going on a prolonged time. I think that it’s very, very easy to be sardonic or ironic in the face of things that are really sentimental or that make us feel exposed or potentially make us feel embarrassed, [but] to be naive and to be soppy and sentimental is to be really human. […] I think that there is a lot of jokes and winks and this and that on my records. And I think that this song was a bit of an antidote for all of that. It’s just nice to have one moment of pure, genuine, soppy, naive sentimentality. That is a massive ingredient in being a person.”

Listen to “Guys” above.

Notes On A Conditional Form is out 5/22 via Dirty Hit/Polydor Records. Pre-order it here.

HBO Max will launch on May 27. If you’ve got questions about pricing and whether your existing HBO subscription will fold you into the access club, we’ve got answers for you. As far as programming goes, though, what we can mostly advise is to prepare for an avalanche of wonderful-sounding Max Originals content that hits many demographics. We already knew that, in addition to a massive library of 10,000+ preexisting movies and TV shows, that the launch would include these series:

– Love Life: A romantic comedy series starring Anna Kendrick and Scoot McNairy
– Legendary: A reality competition series showcasing the underground ballroom community (expect plenty of vogue-ing) with a judging panel that includes Megan Thee Stallion
– On The Record: The documentary film that explores allegations of sexual abuse and harassment made against hip hop mogul Russell Simmons
– Craftopia, a youth-friendly crafting competition show that takes things to extremes
– Kid-geared programs including fresh New Looney Tunes offerings and The Not Too Late Show with Elmo

Mountains of other titles were pinpointed to arrive in 2020 and beyond, and we’re now seeing some dates for the second wave of HBO Max programming. Surprisingly, we’re going to get a recently announced movie that sounded like it would be far off on the schedule, but but silly rabbit, HBO Max acquired the picture from Sony and will have it ready to roll this summer. That would be the Seth Rogen-starring movie (the third in his unofficial “food trilogy“) called An American Pickle, in which he’s taking on dueling roles: (1) A 1920s laborer who awakens 100 years later in Brooklyn; (2) The immigrant’s grandson, a computer coder, who baffles his grandpa.

Here are the rest of the second-wave dates as unveiled by HBO Max:

June 25th: The second-season premiere of DC Universe’s Doom Patrol; a third season of the comedy-thriller Search Party, the first (of four) Adventure Time specials; and a second season of Esme & Roy from Sesame Workshop

July 9th: The premiere of the Expecting Amy docuseries about Amy Schumer’s very pregnant life on the stand-up comedy circuit; and an adult animated comedy called Close Enough that sounds like a roommate adventure from J.G. Quintel

July 16th: A docusoap called The House Of Ho, which will chronicle the multi-generational adventures of a family

July 23rd: An animated children’s series called Tig n’ Seek from Cartoon Network Studios

July 30th: A scripted comedy, Frayed, about a wealthy Londoner who goes back home to Australia; and an unscripted animal rescue series called The Dog House

August 6: An American Pickle will world premiere (in your living rooms) as the first HBO Max original film on the platform under the Warner Max label

HBO Max will arrive on May 27, and more details on the service can be found here.

Drake, Lady Gaga, and The Weeknd are possibly facing a massive breach of their personal information: A law firm that represents the artists, as well as other major musicians, was reportedly hacked this week. The hackers are requesting a large sum of money and threatening to release artists’ personal information.

Grubman Shire Meiselas & Sacks was recently hacked, according to a report from Page Six. The firm’s website is down and hackers are alleged to hold over 756 gigabytes of data from its artists including contracts, endorsement deals, personal emails, and other personal details. The information is reportedly being held at ransom for a whopping $21 million as they threaten to publicize “personal details” pertaining to Gaga, Elton John, Barbra Streisand, and more.

As a report from Complex states, a firm’s representative confirmed the hacking and has called upon “experts” for help: “We can confirm that we’ve been victimized by a cyberattack. We have notified our clients and our staff. We have hired the world’s experts who specialize in this area, and we are working around the clock to address these matters.” Those experts include the FBI, who have reportedly identified the hackers as REvil or Sodinokibi.

The law firm also noted that they were not the only ones to be victimized by the same hackers. A representative stated that HBO, Zoom, and the Texas court system have all been hit with a very similar data breach, calling it a “global extortion scheme.”

Netflix’s Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt polished off its fourth season last year but couldn’t resist returning for an interactive special following Black Mirror‘s Bandersnatch. Thank goodness, because co-creators Tina Fey and Robert Carlock’s effusive brainchild couldn’t be more welcome in 2020. Seriously, no one on earth would be opposed to traveling back in time toward Unbreakable or Bandersnatch-land right about now.

So, welcome some much-needed happiness from co-stars Ellie Kemper, Tituss Burgess, Jane Krakowski, Jon Hamm, and more. They’re doing the choose-your-own-adventure thing, and it’s a sheer pleasure to freely select whether Kimmy Schmidt should make out with her fiancé, played by Daniel Radcliffe, or dig into a mystery. (There’s even a good final season of Game of Thrones burn.) Yes, the show’s still as silly as always, but Kimmy’s on a mission to locate more missing girls, and it’s up to her friends to help make it happen. Jane, who plays spoiled-trophy-wife-turned-talent-agent Jacqueline (my pick for the character who grew the hell up), was gracious enough to sit down with us to hash out this special. Yes, Jane’s got the relentlessly catchy theme song stuck in her head too, but she’s loving all of it.

We could use some sunshine in the world these days, so it’s a good time for more Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.

[Laughs] The timing clearly was not planned, but when I actually tried out the technology of this special for the first time, I did feel that. This colorful candyland of escapism — it feels lovely to revisit these characters, and what a time. We can either spend an hour or up to three hours with these folks and lots of great jokes.

I’ve gone through this special twice. It took me about 90 minutes both times, does that sound about right to you?

I think that’s if you’re doing it as maximum as you can. Did you get different routes and scenes, though, with the options?

Yes, I very much enjoyed Titus’ different naps and how Jacqueline needed to clean up that Titus-mess on his film set.

Yes, yes. I haven’t yet seen it in the path that I’ve gone down, but I need to go down the path of the writer because I love that course. I’m so glad [Zak Orth] was able to work with us on that. He did one of the most impressive scenes that I’ve seen, saying a list of different movie plots. Somewhere, there’s the whole list of 30 things with nothing to help in memorizing it, they were just one-off thoughts. He happened to also be on a Broadway show, so at night, he was doing the Hillary and Clinton play, and he would film all day long with us, and he did the entire list of nonsensical titles in one take without making a mistake, and literally, the entire crew applauded. Sometimes they write stuff for us to see if we can do it, if it’s even possible, but he did it, and it was amazing. Robert Carlock told me that it was somewhere in there in a bonus scene where you can do it uncut, and Zak deserves that. I wanna find it without Jacqueline interrupting it.

With the special, there’s a difference in the usual Unbreakable pace and also your pace from 30 Rock, where you’d have to talk really fast to cram all your jokes in. With this interactive format, you have to pause to let viewers make a choice.

Oh yes, it’s different.

It’s almost like a Dora The Explorer thing, where they ask questions and then stare at the audience. Is that really awkward to film?

Initially, I didn’t really understand it (the stall time), because I’d not done this technology before filming it. The first one thing that we ever filmed for this special was when I’m drinking a soda for a really long time. Two days later, they brought it to me and showed me how it would work, like where the choices are, and then it became my favorite part of filming this experience. Those were the parts that were left unwritten, and you could do anything that you wanted in these empty times, and for an awkward amount of time, which made it more fun and more enjoyable. Those moments, because they were singular to this filming process, became my favorite part. We would go further and further to see what we could get away with in the stall time.

This interactive special was announced after Netflix’s success with the Black Mirror episode, “Bandersnatch.” Did you try that one out?

I didn’t, and in hindsight, I probably should have. When I watched the Unbreakable special for the first time, I watched it with my son because he knew how to use the remote and technology, which was a lot easier than I thought it would be, and he had done it with Bear Grylls [in You vs. Wild, also on Netflix]. He turned it on and just started doing it. I was thankful that I had a nine-year-old in the apartment to help me figure this out. I have heard that [Bandersnatch] is very different in tone. I would be curious to know what they did in the stall time.

It was awkward, for sure, but it was also so bleak, so there’s a contrast with the Unbreakable special because it’s so lighthearted, even though, obviously, the show was born from dark subject matter (women getting kidnapped).

Yeah, to me, I’ve always actually really loved the episodes where they lean into that, sort-of the darker side because the show is so light and funny and colorful, in actual color and spirit. I remember when people [questioned that] this was going to be a comedy when they explained what the plot was. And really, only from the minds of Robert and Tina could they come up with such a show where it would be so positive, coming from such a bleak base. I actually was taken by surprise near the end [of the special] when Kimmy does find other women, and I’m laughing along, because, right, that’s the whole thing. Those women always take me by surprise and move me because it gives the characters and the story such weight.

Even Jacqueline goes through terrible things, like right after she married David Cross’ character.

Oh, right, he got smooshed! [Laughs]

She managed to grow despite all of that darkness, which happens with this show, so it’s good to have it back, if only for an episode.

It’s so nice that you feel that way. The series was completed, and we were hopeful that this sort-of thing would come along, and when it did, it was a great joy for us all to get back together. I very much enjoy putting Jacqueline’s amazing wardrobe and 1% beliefs back on and having more fun with these characters. It was also a major get for us to get Daniel Radcliffe to come to this special. I had been a fan of his, obviously from his movies and seeing him on Broadway, and I’ve always wanted to know this guy. He really goes for it and tries so many different things, and he’s interested, and I like that about him. In the scenes that I got to film with him, he’s so professional and hilarious. After the first read-through, some of us thought, “Whoa, he’s so funny, we’ve got to get our act together.” We could have done already while filming, but it was nice to have somebody of his stature come in and raise our game.

His energy probably also helped to freshen things up.

For sure, and it helped with Kimmy’s story and how she’s developed. It worked on so many levels, and he’s an absolute delight. I really like that guy.

Daniel Radcliffe’s a perk of the job, but if we’re talking about occupational hazards, I have to ask: do you ever get the theme song stuck in your head?

Whenever I hear it, yes!

That’s a relief because it’s in my head as we speak.

Jeff Richmond is very good at making an earworm. He has added so much to 30 Rock and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt through his theme songs, through his songs that have gone viral, even the scoring. His scoring brings so much to the talent of these shows and the jokes. Even his 30-second samples of theme songs are amazing.

With your long-running, larger-than-life characters, like Elaine from Ally McBeal, Jenna from 30 Rock, and Jacqueline, they’re all beloved in different ways. Was it more difficult to say goodbye to any of them in particular?

There’s so much more that goes into saying goodbye to a character in a long-running series. The years that you’ve spent together, if you’re lucky enough to have those years. Ally McBeal was my first big TV show, my first experience of being on a popular show, so that will always have a place in my heart — all of those guys and David Kelley and that experience — because that was a shift in the notoriety of my career, so that was a big life change. And then 30 Rock was this very special venture. What’s really interesting is that, because of streaming, younger people are telling me that they’re just watching the show for the first time, and it’s pretty great to see it live on and be asked to speak at graduations and stuff because of 30 Rock. They’re rediscovering it because they were too young to watch it the first time around. We were the show that didn’t get high ratings, and we were the underdog. We weren’t supposed to make it. That show will always be special to me because of the Little-Engine-That-Could quality, and I know it’s hard to say that after winning all those Emmys, but it did have that vibe and lived in that sort-of cult-y kind of place. I never saw it coming that I’d work with Tina Fey and Robert Carlock for 11 TV seasons in a row. That is the best fortune I could have in my life. I love playing flawed characters and bringing their flaws to humor. I don’t know if it’s my way of coping, but I like doing that for characters, and the characters that they’ve written for me have been extremely flawed, which have given them lots to heighten and comedy gold.

As we sign off here, do you have any advice for Jacqueline, for wherever she might be going, in the future?

Oh my goodness, what would it be? I’ve always had sympathy for Jacqueline. We’re talking about a bleak start, a woman who changed her appearance so much, starting with her Native American roots, to be blonde and get a rich husband in New York. I’ve always had sympathy for her because I never thought she really believed in herself. She has finally entered a time when she’s standing on her own and can choose her own path, and I hope she believes in herself now. That she is good at what she does with whatever skills and tools she has, however limited, she’s doing it, and she’s succeeding, and that makes me happy to think that she’s moving forward in the world.

‘Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt: Kimmy vs. the Reverend’ is currently streaming on Netflix.

There have been a number of disturbing storylines on The Walking Dead over the course of the ten-season series. There have been cannibals and baseball-bat bashings, along with people murdered in their sleep, a child shot in the head, more murdered children, and, of course, a series of spiked, decapitated heads that were used to create a property line. One storyline early on, however, was cut at the last minute, because it was too dark for the series at the time.

Recall Axel, the recurring character played by Lew Temple during the prison run in season three? Originally, Axel was meant to be a serial killer, as the actor who played him, Lew Temple, told Talk Dead to Me podcast: “I showed up with the idea that it was going to be serial killer and foreboding, and then, the day-of, got a note to switch that. ‘No, no, we’ve gotta lighten things up a little bit. We’ve been pretty dark.’”

Instead of being a killer, we find out that Axel was in prison for robbing a store with a toy gun, and he becomes a likable character who befriends Carol. However, even after they decided not to immediately turn Axel into a villain, the series kept the idea in their back pocket in case they needed it.

“There were some episodes that are written where I do take Beth out into the woods and slaughter her,” Temple said on the podcast. “We didn’t get to any of those. That was why I kept buttoned up. He was going to come undone, be totally Henry Rollins-tattooed. The whole thing about being a drug addict was all a big facade. The thing about the squirt gun and pistol is all bullsh*t. Carol, he beats the sh*t out of her. I mean, just these really dark things that the writers were talking about.”

Sadly, Axel would soon become The Governor’s first victim, unceremoniously shot in the head while having a conversation with Carol and otherwise minding his own business.

Instead of turning Axel into a serial killer, the writers on The Walking Dead ultimately decided that they wanted The Governor to the be show’s first major living villain. Axel had to be sacrificed, although Temple suggests they considered killing someone else off instead. In fact, he says, Andrew Lincoln tried to talk the producers into keeping Axel around. It was not to be.

Of course, 10 seasons later, a serial-killer storyline sounds fairly tame for The Walking Dead. However, the idea of anyone “beating the sh*t out of Carol” sounds very dark, if only for the way in which Carol would eventually get her revenge.

(Via Talk Dead to Me Podcast and HuffPo)

Earthgang’s psychedelic adventures in Mirrorland continue in the latest video from their debut album, “Fields.” Continuing the head-spinning, eye-popping journey depicted in their videos for “Lala Challenge” and “Avenue” — once again conceptualized by Strangeloop Studios and McKay Felt — “Fields” is a bit more languid, with Olu and WowGr8 spending some time laying in the grass and contemplating life rather than being beset by flying monkeys and desert tornadoes.

Like many artists, the duo had to adjust their promotional strategy on the fly once they couldn’t stage more elaborate video shoots due to social distancing guidelines, but unlike a lot of others, they had an album concept they could express naturally through animation, with the resources and connections to bring their colorful Mirrorland to life. Meanwhile, their real lives have been a bit more down to Earth; Wowgr8 is busy being a dad — but not too busy to contribute a verse to Guapdad 4000’s Rona Raps — while Olu has been hosting video yoga sessions for his Instagram followers.

2020 has mostly been an “up” year for the Atlanta duo though, with their features on Revenge Of The Dreamers III earning them their first platinum plaques as well as a Grammy nomination for Best Rap Album before the lockdown.
Watch Earthgang’s “Fields” video above.

The RX is Uproxx Music’s stamp of approval for the best albums, songs, and music stories throughout the year. Inclusion in this category is the highest distinction we can bestow, and signals the most important music being released throughout the year. The RX is the music you need, right now.

Jason Isbell doesn’t normally see a lot of value in revisiting his old albums. “On one hand, you’re going to be overly critical of yourself,” the 41-year-old singer-songwriter explained. “On the other hand, you want to avoid being that guy who lives perpetually in his high school football glory.”

Nevertheless, he gamely obliged to reminisce about his previous six records on the eve of his seventh, Reunions, entering the world on Friday. For Isbell, the path from his 2007 solo debut Sirens Of The Ditch — which he started working on when he was still in Drive-By Truckers, and put out shortly after he was kicked out of the band — signifies one of the great personal and artistic evolutions in contemporary rock.

Back in the aughts, he was a hard-drinking malcontent who struggled — against himself more than anything — to realize his potential. Over time, however, he would become one of the most respected songwriters in the game, thoughtfully developing his craft and deepening his pet themes: The never-ending fight to overcome self-doubt and self-sabotage, the fraught dynamics between parents and children, the dark pull of the past, and the basic human need to hope for a better tomorrow.

Listening to Reunions, you can hear Isbell write with as much elegance on these topics as he ever has. Two of the most affecting tracks, “Dreamsicle” and “Letting You Go,” are parental narratives in which the troubled boy in the first song becomes the anxious parent in the second. “It Gets Easier” is a dialogue between a sober man and his drunken former self, and how the battle to not become that guy again is unceasing. “Only Children” is a melancholy remembrance of an old friend who didn’t achieve the shared dreams of the narrator. The brilliant “River” ties a charming traditional gospel melody to a story about a remorseful man who is actually much more of a scoundrel than he lets on.

These songs are excellent additions to an already impressive body of work. Though he didn’t intend to do it, Reunions feels both unique in Isbell’s catalogue — it’s the closest he’s come to making a concept record — and like an extension of his other albums. To trace his journey to Reunions, Isbell reflected on his discography and how he got here.

Sirens Of The Ditch (2007)

I wanted to make a record that was completely mine because I was playing with the Drive-By Truckers at that point. As much as I loved making music with those guys — especially then, before things went sour — I felt like I needed to make a record that was my own. When I was writing a song for the Truckers, in my mind, I was thinking, “I need to stay within the confines of that project,” because it wasn’t my project. It was Patterson [Hood]’s project. So it was kind of weird to write songs that fit with that band. Everything else that I was writing at the time went into the bin for my own album that I was planning to make.

I think one problem that I had in those days was the idea of, if I’m making a record, then I need to do something that warrants being called a producer. If something was done, then I would go back and say, “I don’t feel like this is the work of a producer yet, so I need to produce this some more.” That wound up, in a lot of ways, causing some trouble, because I couldn’t just let something be at that point in my life. And that carried on for the next couple albums. When we went back to do remixes of the self-titled album, Dave Cobb said, “Why are there 15 guitars in this track?” And I was like, “Man, that’s because I was producing, Dave. I was producing.” I didn’t know what the fuck producing meant. I was just doing it.

I’ll tell you that there’s no feeling quite like remixing a record that you produced in your 20s, with Dave Cobb now. That was probably the most terrifying thing I did last year, and I sang harmony with Barry Gibb last year in the studio.

Jason Isbell And The 400 Unit (2009)

I remember being really excited to work with Matt Pence, because we didn’t have a drummer at that point in time, and we got Matt to come in and engineer the album and play drums on it. And that was really fun for me because Matt is one of my favorite musicians and he’s a great engineer, and makes really strange choices that I just thought were really cool. When I hear Blake Mills’ production on the Alabama Shakes record [Sound + Color], it reminds me a lot of the things that Matt was doing in Denton, Texas, at his studio, years before that. There was some really cool rhythmic stuff on that album, that didn’t happen really anywhere else in the catalogue because we were so excited to have Matt in the room with us.

It was a very dark time for me, personally. And I always try to document where my mind is at when I’m making an album. I was in a pretty bad spot then, because I’d been kicked out of the Truckers and you would’ve thought that would’ve been a catalyst for me to turn my life around. But I had to go quite a bit further down for that happen. My personal life was a disaster. I always felt physically and emotionally like shit. You can definitely hear that in the lyrics on that record. Even things that aren’t personal, there’s still sort of this desperation and just general malaise on that album. Thankfully, I didn’t do that on any other album, because nobody wants to hear that.

I had a hard time going back and forgiving that guy enough to metaphorically have a conversation with him. Not to skip ahead, but that had a lot to do with the content of Reunions. In a lot of ways, I was going back and reuniting with that guy because I felt like it was safe to do that for the first time in a long time. If you forgive your past self too quickly, it can cause you to become that person again.

Here We Rest (2011)

I felt like we really had something on that one and I still do. I think that’s a really good record, and I think that’s the first time I felt like I had a voice of my own that was worth listening to.

We sort of embraced the nature of the songs on that record. There are some country moments and some more roots-based moments that I think I was intentionally turning away from before, just to delineate my work from the work I did with the Truckers. When I stopped trying so hard to make those kinds of decisions and just let the songs be, then you get “Codeine,” “Alabama Pines” and some things that I feel like are really strong, and things that I’m still happy to play every night.

I figured something out with “Alabama Pines.” I think I figured out when a song is finished. And that was huge for me, because before that, I had stopped too early and I hadn’t taken the time to edit as much as I needed to and make sure every word was right, every line was right. In “Alabama Pines,” I was feeling the subject matter so much and it was so important to me that I took extra time with it, and I did the work to make sure it was complete. And after that, I saw what I was capable of doing if I worked that hard on a song.

“Dress Blues” was a good song because of the subject matter and because of the story, but I didn’t have to do a whole lot to write that song. I think “Alabama Pines” was the first really great song that I felt like I had written and not just allowed to write itself.

Southeastern (2013)

I was going to do that with Ryan Adams. He was going to produce it. And then at the last minute, he pulled a Ryan Adams and backed out, probably because he heard the songs and was threatened by honesty.

Luckily, I had met Dave Cobb and had a pretty good conversation with him. We called him and said, “Can you make this record next week? It’s the only time I have. I got to go back on the road and work.” And Dave said, “Yeah. I’ll push everything that I have and we’ll do it at my house.” So we made that record at Dave’s house.

Things were new to me at that point. I was at that stage where I had just recently sobered up, and then I wrote all those songs right after I got sober. I was in a very fortunate position as a storyteller, because I had developed the ability to write a song, because even when I was drinking and wasting a lot of my time, I was still spending a lot of time working on the craft of songwriting. And I had realized with Here We Rest that I had more to offer.

When it came time to write Southeastern, I didn’t have anything else to do. I was sober and I didn’t have any kids and my day was my own. I had a lot of space to fill and I filled it by just sitting there writing, and working really hard on each individual lyric, and trying to make everything as perfect as I could. So when I went into the studio with that, I went in with a bomb strapped to my chest.

Something More Than Free (2015)

I remember being angry before we went into record that record. Just angry at the state of the world in general. I remember being really elated on the other hand about the success that we had found in our work. I remember thinking, “There’s a chasm here between my own personal experience and life and the lives of the people I grew up around back home.” And that was making me angry because I was confused by it. I wrote about that some on that record and more on The Nashville Sound,

It was definitely a time in my life when I had found success that I had never found before. When we went out on the Southeastern tour, people were standing outside in parking lots to the venues, trying to see the show through the window because they couldn’t get in. And then it came time to write another record and I was still the same guy who had grown up in a tiny town in Alabama full of people who felt increasingly desperate as the days went by. So it was the first period in my life where I started trying to come to terms with that separation. And I’m still coming to terms with it now. It’s still something that I wrote about on the new record. It concerns me a lot. How do I be grateful for the things that I have and enjoy the life that I’ve been lucky enough and worked hard enough to get, and still keep in mind the fact that, most of the people who I grew up with are having a really difficult time?

None of it is political. People who call it political are people who are trying to make it smaller. People who feel threatened by my stories, they call it political music because they want to put that in a box. It makes it easier to dismiss. None of this shit is political. If I was writing political songs, I’d be writing about Robert’s fucking Rules Of Order. Politics is just the exchange of power. It’s who gets to speak. And it’s not interesting and it’s not the kind of thing that makes for a broad exploration of the human experience.

These are stories. And you can’t argue with stories. You can’t argue with me saying, “This happened to me and I did this,” but you can argue with politics.

The Nashville Sound (2017)

Seems like 1,000 years ago. It feels like I’ve been in my house for 900 years, like fucking Yoda.

That was a really enjoyable experience, making that record. I had a really good time in the studio. Everybody was having fun. That one was more of a live-recording type of record than Reunions, so it was like, every day, I would go in, I would play the song for the band and for Dave. And then we would all go sit down. We would play it half a dozen times until we got it right. And the songs looked good and everybody was in a good mood and we had a blast.

There was some pressure that was starting to build that I was ignoring, because we had such success with Southeastern and Something More Than Free. I was certainly ignoring that pressure, but it was still building. It came to a head when we were recording Reunions. My wife [Amanda Shires] and I had a really difficult time of it for a couple of weeks, but everything’s all right now. But I’ve discovered that I have a tendency to pretend that I’m not feeling pressured if I don’t feel like the reasons for the pressure are justifiable. Going into to make a record after you’ve had two or three successful records in a row, to me, doesn’t feel like a good reason to be upset. It’s like, if you can’t ignore that, then you’re just kind of being an asshole.

But the fact is, I was still feeling that pressure. Though I don’t think I was feeling it so severely when we did The Nashville Sound.

Reunions (2020)

When we were making Reunions, I was really tense. Just really fucking tense the whole time.

Truth be told, I was worried about whether or not the songs were good enough and whether or not the album was going to be good enough. Sadly, for me, I didn’t necessarily enjoy the process of making that record as much as I could have, which, in hindsight, I regret because I think it’s a great record.

What I saw as focus probably came across as me being an asshole, dismissive, like, “Stop! Get away from me with that!” I started being the typical boss at a company or some shit. I think, by the time we did Reunions. That made the atmosphere definitely difficult for my wife. I don’t know how the rest of the band really felt about it, but for her, that was tough because I wasn’t doing a good job of combining the personal and the business end of things. But I think I worked my way through that. I feel better about it now.

You remember Tears For Fears? Everything that they wrote was about the trauma that you suffer as a child, and about how the only really successful method that has been found for overcoming it was primal scream therapy, in their opinion. Now that I have a small child, I spend a lot of time thinking about what went right and what went wrong when I was a kid, and why I felt the way that I did. When I was a kid, I didn’t have any other kids around me. Nobody in my family was my age. Everybody was either way older than me or way younger than me. And I have figured out, through a lot of therapy, that I took things way more seriously than I should have, because when the folks around me were in a state of crisis, most of them were in a state of crisis because of a really serious problem. Like maybe my uncle was upset because he was getting a divorce, not because he hadn’t studied enough for his fifth-grade math test. So to me, because we parrot the people around us, I sort of assumed that kind of pressure for everything that I was doing, when I was just really doing normal shit for a 7-year-old kid. But to me, it felt like the stakes were life and death.

I think “Dreamsicle” is rooted in this beautiful image of being a child and enjoying that experience, but at the same time, there are there really heavy things going on around that child. Probably at the root of the song is, “This doesn’t have anything to do with you, kid. This is not your fault, this is not your doing, and this is not your business, and the best thing you can do is just continue to be a kid.”

The changes that I went through in the last couple of years were very significant, psychologically, to me. A lot of things wound up coming back up. I think maybe my unconscious mind was writing a concept album, but the rest of me didn’t realize that was happening.

The first song that I wrote for this album was “Only Children.” I was on vacation with my wife and a couple of really close friends, and we were in Greece, on the island there, where Leonard Cohen lived, in Hydra. All that sounds ridiculous. It is in fact what was really happening. My best friend, Will, is a writer/editor for a magazine, and his wife is a writer and a naturalist and herbalist. Obviously, my wife is a writer. So we were all sitting around sharing our work with each other and talking about our work and reading things out loud and singing things out loud. It occurred to me that I haven’t done that much over the last couple of decades, since I became a professional creative person. The part where you sit around with your friends and share what you’ve been working on. And I missed that a lot.

That set the tone for the rest of the album. I started thinking about things that I missed and people that I missed. And then at the same time, I was coming to terms with the person I used to be, and I felt safe to reopen the conversation with that person. “It Gets Easier” is the first time I’ve gone back and addressed that guy. On the primary level, I was speaking to people who have a similar experience to mine and who have been sober for quite a while. And on another level, I was talking to myself then and saying, “This is possible. Don’t let your guard down, but this is possible and it’s worth it.”

We have a bunch of weird songwriter sayings around the house, but one of them is, “Don’t you dare tell people that song is not about what they think it’s about, because that’s not fair. Don’t take that away from them.” And it’s true. It’s not mine once it’s written and recorded and put out there in the world. It doesn’t really belong to me anymore. And for the same reason that I don’t go back and revisit those albums a lot, I’m not going to go online and tell people they’re wrong when they’re feeling emotions to a piece of work that I created. I’m just grateful that it has a relevance to people.

Reunions is out on May 15 via Southeastern Records. Get it here.