https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=-JqbDwiE7Qo
When I moved to Boston, I started collecting old vinyl records. Of course, I had records when I was a kid. But in the 90s in Boston, you could pick up vinyl for like three for a buck. You know, it was dirt cheap. So I used to go into the record stores and pick up any old weird looking album, usually from the 50s, 40s through the 60s. And I built a big collection of country and Western music. And then I made a couple of CDs I called Western Blues and was giving those out for Christmas presents. And I actually have a Spotify playlist that’s 29 hours long now with 600 songs on it that I’ve collected for 40 years. My wife and I listen to it a lot in the car. It’s real good driving music. You know, and I’m going to just list some of the characters that I listen to. You’re familiar with all these guys, but a lot of people watching and listening won’t be. And they should be. There’s Hank Williams, of course. Bill Monrone is Kentucky Boys. Coulter Walls, a new guy from Saskatchewan. Oh, yeah. He’s a great young… Yeah, he’s great. My son played one of his songs to open my lectures for 11 shows this year. That was really fun. Johnny Horton, Tex Ritter, Hank Snow, Flat and Scruggs, the Carter family, Jimmy Rogers, the Stanley Brothers, Roy Ackoff, Hatberry Ramblers, Gypsy Kings, Leon Redbone, etc. Tammy and I, my wife, we just watched the Ken Burns Country Music documentary, which is absolutely great. It’s just brilliant. Eight two-hour episodes. And I’ve done a couple of shows at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville. So that was fun. There’s a great bar there called Robert’s Western World that I go to when I go down to Nashville. And they have a band there called Kelly’s Heroes. They did some music for me at the Grand Ole Opry. Played a vicious rendition of the American National Anthem on electric guitar. And they do a great version of Ghost Riders in the Sky, great blues guitar version of Ghost Riders in the Sky. So anyways, I thought I’d tell you that just so you know that I’m not a Johnny-come-lately to the kind of music that you’ve been playing. And so… Yeah, that’s very in like with my listening. So I love a lot of the older music and older blues like Delta Blues and that type of thing. But yeah, that’s… I wouldn’t have guessed that about you. So that’s good to know. Yeah, it’s… Yeah, well about a quarter of this Spotify playlist is Delta Blues too, because there’s a great overlap between that Delta Blues tradition and the kind of music that you’re interested in. And you said that too. I saw that really portrayed well, for example. I don’t know if you’ve seen the new Elvis movie, a relatively new Elvis movie, which I thought was great. But it does a lovely job of laying out the relationship between that black blues tradition and Western country tradition. You know, it’s not a connection that people often make, but there’s a real sink there in terms of musical genre. Nice interplay between the different musical forms. So cool to see. And of course, we’re all the beneficiaries of that, you know, American musical tradition. Something you may look at adding to your playlist or looking up that I think you’d find interesting is… I don’t know who the group is in the video, but if you go on YouTube, it’s called Carpathian Folk Music. It’s usually the first video to pull up under Carpathian Folk Music. And it’s maybe… I want to say it’s about 45 minutes long. And it goes… And it plays out almost like a symphony. Like it starts in sort of one element and then it has its ups and downs. I’ve listened to that thing 200 times. Sitting out in the woods listening to that, it takes you on a ride almost the way like Beethoven would. But it reminds me kind of almost a lot of the older country and blues. It’s a very weird element, but it’s got a lot of that sort of bluegrass elements to it. Fiddle and upright bass and stuff like that. You ought to check it out, the Carpathian Folk Music. I will 100% check that out. Yeah, one of the things that’s really quite a mystery about music, and I can’t quite figure it out, is… I like classical music. I listen to a lot of music in the car. Classical music’s hard to listen to in a car because it’s got such an immense dynamic range. But classical music is obviously extremely sophisticated and complex and brilliant and reaches up into this stratosphere of genius. There’s dead simple music that manages exactly the same thing. Johnny Cash is a great example of that. In the Ken Burns documentary, you find out when Johnny Cash first started, his musicians could barely play at all. You know, they knew like three chords. Of course, the Sex Pistols were like that too. Weirdly enough, and I don’t get this exactly, one of the hallmarks of musical genius is authenticity and genuineness. You can take a really simple melody and you can do something stunningly brilliant with it. Hank Williams is great at that. It gives it a depth that’s timeless. It doesn’t age, which is what timeless means, of course. It has to be something like that, genuineness. It must be something like that that sparked the imagination of people around your song. When I was listening to it, I listened to it a couple of times this morning just to re-familiarize myself with it before we talked. And you have a genuineness of voice that has obviously struck a chord. And so, while I’m curious about that, first of all, I’m really curious about how you’re doing because you’ve been like the center of a media firestorm here in the last couple of weeks. And that must be shocking to you. What’s that be like? And why do you think your song, what is it about your song that you think you did right that contributed to its going viral? So I have taken time to try to understand that myself. The song skyrocketed in a way that there’s been accusations that it was propped up, almost that I’m an industry plant. It was like we posted the song on, we recorded it on a Saturday. I think he uploaded it on Tuesday. And by Thursday, man, we were on a roller coaster ride. It was already apparent that things were heading in a direction that nothing else on his channel had done previously, Radio WV. I guess to answer the first part of your question, how I’m doing, surprisingly very calm. I’ve been entertained the last couple of weeks. I’ve been given sort of an unfair advantage of how the internet works and how narratives are spread in certain directions. People form opinions about things like, for example, me playing the Super Bowl. I’ve gotten a lot of comments and messages saying that I’m a sellout that I’ve decided to sing at the Super Bowl. But that was just an internet meme that someone created on Facebook. For example, the one that popped up yesterday was that Oliver Anthony stuck at Burning Man. People were sending me stuff telling me how terrible it was that I’m at this like, Burning Man’s this satanic ritual place and you shouldn’t be there. I uploaded a video of me hanging out with my goats in the woods like, yeah, man, Burning Man. It’s terrible being stuck at Burning Man. I try not to take myself so seriously and I’ve tried not to take the situation so seriously. I’m blessed for the opportunity to be here. I mean, even just being able to have a conversation with you is surreal. Meeting Joe Rogan was surreal. The artists that I’ve looked up to like Jamie Johnson and Shooter Jennings, and it’s just so weird that they’re a phone call away now. I’m doing well. As I’m sure you know, the last couple of years haven’t been so great for me anyway as far as my own perception on life. This is exciting to have a new opportunity to dive into. It’s really what I’ve been wanting to do for a long time. I’ve just been so terrified of the idea of doing it. Here I am. There’s no going back now, I guess. Yeah, well, that’s actually something I wanted to talk to you about because I was reading when I was doing some background research on you. This is relevant to the issue of selling out that you brought up. I’ve worked with a lot of artists and I’ve worked with a lot of wannabe artists too, or at least had contact with them. One of the things I’ve really noticed is that many of the people I’ve met who are extremely artistically talented shoot themselves in the foot on the commercial side of things. They do that in three ways. The first is four ways. The first is they’re actually terrified of commercial success. That’s actually understandable because along with commercial success comes a transformation in lifestyle and in social positioning. It’s easy to be leery of that and there’s some utility in that, especially if you’re a private person. Then there’s ideological issues that come up too. So the issue of selling out is a really relevant one. Lots of artists will refuse to have anything to do with the commercial end of their enterprise because they’re afraid that that will interfere with the flourishing of their artistic spirit. And that’s foolish. It’s foolish for a bunch of reasons. First of all, why create unless people have access to what you create? Maybe you enjoy it yourself and that would be perfectly the case, for example, with music. But if you’re a performer, in principle, you want people to hear what you have to perform so they can enjoy it, partly so you can get feedback, so you can get better. So you actually want to bring your work to the attention of as many people as possible. The people who bitch and moan about selling out most loudly are almost always people who’ve had no opportunity to sell out. No one’s ever offered them the chance to be commercially successful. And so what they do is they elevate their moral stance falsely by claiming that they’re the sort of people that would never fall prey to any capitalist temptations when the truth is they’re not talented enough or interesting enough for anyone to ever offer them that possibility. And then the other thing that creative people do that’s a really big problem is they don’t construe the marketing end, the communication end, as another creative challenge. You know, so if you’re a creative person, you actually overlap with people who have entrepreneurial interests temperamentally. But one of the things you can do if you’re creative and this stops you from selling out is to understand that the venture of marketing yourself and presenting yourself and developing a professional persona and also learning how to buffer yourself against the negative consequences of that is also a creative challenge. You know, because you might ask any creative person might ask, well, if I was going to handle the problem of being successful creatively, how would I do that? And then it becomes another creative problem instead of like an antithesis between, let’s say, the selling out capitalism that would warp your, you know, your creative spirit and the creative spirit itself.