Take charge of your career. Take charge of what you do. Be confident in your decisions. Listen. Of course you want to listen to people and listen to people that know what they're doing. But ultimately, you have to make the decisions. If you just coast, you might have a career for a little while, but if you want a long career, you're going to have to take charge and ownership of it, and you're going to have to guide it, and you're going to have to have your finger on the button all the time, and you're going to have to say yes, and you're going to have to say no. But if you don't have a vision about what you want to do, if you don't have a plan about what you want to do, if you don't act on it every day, it's not going to happen. It's just not going to happen.
Tim, it's so nice to finally meet in person.
Likewise. And I've not been to Nashville in so long. And it's just lovely around here.
It's incredible. And it changes every day. Yeah.
I mean, I get lost anytime I come downtown. I get lost because everything looks so different.
Franklin looks like it's just had facelift after facelift after facelift.
I know. And when I first moved here in '89, all of that Cool Springs, all that stuff was still all countryside.
And I remember land being not very expensive out there. And I didn't have two nickels to rub together. I'm thinking, man, if I could just buy some land out here and build me a little cabin, find me a club gig, you know, everything would be great. And cut to two years later and it's just everything's through the roof. I mean, it's just going crazy and it doesn't seem to be slowing down at all.
You just offered me the perfect segue.
Well, that's what I'm here for. Thank you. You know, I appreciate this, Tim, that we're getting started here. I was looking back. You were kind enough to answer some questions for Tribe of Mentors.
My last book. And I was going back to reread it and I looked at your bio and at the time it read Tim McGraw has sold more than 50 million records, dot dot dot, and all of these amazing accolades. And then I looked at the more recent and it's more than 106 million records worldwide. Your longevity is mind-boggling on a number of different levels.
Yeah, me too. It's mind-boggling to me too. People are still putting up with me.
And I'm wondering how have you thought about or how has your creative process changed over the years? Like what has remained the same? What has changed? Because there's so many ingredients that you have to get right for you to not just last but succeed over the decades that you have.
Well, one thing that doesn't change is great songs.
That's the first check. Should be the first check on any artist list. I mean, I write for every project. And I've been lucky enough to have some success with some of the things I write, but for me, the song always has to win. And wherever the song comes from, that's what it's going to be. And I listen to songs constantly. I'm constantly writing, constantly listening. I'm hard on my own songs. That's probably why I haven't cut as many.
But my process is pretty much the same. I think material-wise, I look for different kinds of music than I used to. I still like fun songs and if I find the right fun song, I'll do it. But it's tougher at a certain age to sing about, you know, Daisy Dukes and tailgates all the time. You know, it just doesn't quite ring true to me. But, you know, every now and then something comes along that's funny. You just do it because you're an artist and you're telling a story and you do it. But I gravitate more towards songs now that not only have meaning to me, but I think people can find a deeper meaning in their own situation, in their own life.
I would love for you to, if you could maybe unpack for us a song, okay? Could be any song. And what I'm angling for is of course the genesis, but also what do you do when the muse goes a little quiet, right? You can't just as a working musician be like, well, I'm going to wait a year for lightning to strike. There's probably some process behind it. And I am not a musician, but I'm deeply interested in it. One of my favorite albums of all time is Graceland by Paul Simon.
And I was listening to his backstory as he explained how a number of those songs came together and I was just mesmerized.
So, could you tell the story of any song that comes to mind? And the genesis, you know, probably Live Like You Were Dying would be a good place to start because that song came to me. It was right after my dad was diagnosed with brain cancer, glioblastoma. And Tim Nichols and Craig Wiseman sent that song to me. They wrote it about my dad when they found out that that was happening and sent it to me. And I never played it for my dad. He was sick at the time. I just felt that it was not appropriate to play a song about dying to your dad who was dying.
Although I'm sure he would have loved the idea of having a song that was about him or inspired by him. I didn't play it for him. I had the song and in his last days he was at our farm in the cabin at our farm. That's where he wanted to be for his last days and spent a lot of time with him and I think it was right around two weeks, two to three weeks after he passed away that we went to the studio to record and we recorded in upstate New York at a place right outside of Woodstock at a place called Bear Studios.
I actually know the studios.
You know it's beautiful. It's an old Dutch farmhouse and barn up on top of a mountain. Beautiful. We had like three foot of snow. We were there for three weeks. We sent two semi-trucks full of Persian rugs and furniture and just decked the place out for the band and myself for three weeks while we were cutting. And my dad's older brother, Hank, I invited him to come hang with us because, you know, Tug had just died and I know he wasn't doing very well. So, I invited him to come hang with us while we were recording. And it was probably six or seven days into the recording process and we would start late and we would go till three or four in the morning recording and I remember it was about 1:00 in the morning and I had this glass booth built in the middle of the studio so I could see everybody and there was fireplaces at each end and the fireplaces were roaring. I had my glass booth in the middle. We were cutting the song. My uncle Hank was smoking a joint. If you know my uncle Hank, he's passed away. He passed away last year now but he was an all-American athlete. Three sports, played pro baseball for 13 years, greatest guy in the world, looked just like Sam Elliott, but was a pothead from day one. So I watched him and he was sitting over there and I just got to thinking. I thought, you know, this might be a good time to cut Live Like You Were Dying. So we'd just finished a song. We were doing some overdubs. I gathered everybody around and I gathered Hank around and I asked everybody what their opinion was. They felt like tackling that song. So about 2:00 in the morning, we cranked it up and before the sun came up, we had that song done. And it was so tough because I'm sitting in the glass booth recording the song, you know, directing the band, you know, getting the parts right and I can't help but watch my uncle Hank the entire time that we're doing it and he's just in a puddle over in the corner and then he's laughing and then he starts telling stories about Tug after everything. So, we recorded the song. We got finished probably about 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning and then we just sat and listened to Uncle Hank tell stories about Tug for the rest of the night. And I have to believe that all that magic of that night of Hank being there, Tug had only been gone for a couple of weeks and then Hank telling the stories afterwards. I have to believe that all of that went into that record.
There's so many different aspects to that, each of which you can unpack. When you mentioned it seemed like a good time or it might be a good time. Why did it seem like a good time? Was it a feeling inside of you as you looked at your uncle?
As I looked at my uncle, it just felt like that I was being told to cut this song. Everything, the vibes coming off of him, what I was feeling at the time. And I think we had just cut something really uptempo and pretty rocking. And I don't know, it was the mood, the snow outside, the fireplaces, my uncle sitting there being so late at night. Maybe there was a melancholy that sort of struck at that time. I'm sure there were some other factors that might have been involved that struck about that time when you're in the studio that late. But it just felt like there was magic in the air at that moment and we wanted to capture it. And we always like to say, you know, you can have the greatest song in the world, greatest band in the world, greatest singer in the world, which I am not, but you can have all those factors and it's still not going to work. And we always say sometimes God just walks through the room.
Yeah. All right. I want to pick up on that thread and then we're going to go back to some of your family history because I mean, millions upon millions upon millions know your music, but I think fewer know the origin story. So, we will get to that. But I also want to ask, when is the first time when you felt God walk through the door with one of your songs where you're like, 'Oh, oh, oh, well, okay. I think maybe we have some lightning in a bottle here.'
I would like to say it was Don't Take the Girl, but I didn't feel that way after we recorded it because I never felt like I captured exactly what I wanted on that record.
Until we finally finished it. I felt like we had it. But in the process of it, I felt like a struggle on that song. But Indian Outlaw, because I had that song for my first album and nobody liked it. The label didn't like it. James Stroud didn't like it. Byron liked it, but I couldn't talk James into letting me record it and I couldn't talk the label into letting me.
What were the reasons they gave you?
They just said it was too controversial and it was a bad song. Just it wasn't country music. It won't work on radio. All the things that they were right about. I heard that song the first night I moved to Nashville. I got to Nashville at 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning on a Greyhound bus, walked down to the Hall of Fame lounge and hotel where I ended up staying for a couple of weeks. Walked into the bar and everybody was closing down. The band was packing up and Tommy Barnes and Max D. Barnes were sitting at the bar. I think it's Max D. Barnes. He's sitting at the bar. The bar's closing down. So I walk in and just ordered a beer and she said, 'Well, we just had last call, but I'll give you a beer.' I sat down. So I started talking to these two guys. Tommy says, 'Do you have a room?' And I said, 'Yeah.' So let's go play some music. So me, Tommy, and Max Barnes went up and started playing music. Within stepping off the bus and Tommy played Indian Outlaw and I Don't Want to Be There in the Morning When She Wakes Up and Finds Me Gone, which ended up cutting both of those. I have three more songs of his I heard that first night that I'm going to cut eventually. But Indian Outlaw, heard that first night and I started playing it immediately. Learned it. Started playing it in all the clubs around town, the honky-tonks around town when we would go travel and play clubs all over the country. I was playing that song and we'd end up having to play it two or three times a night, four times a night because people loved it so much. And I kept telling the label when I was going in to cut my first record. This was before I had a record. I knew it worked. I didn't have any say on the first album. So when we went to cut the second album, I just said that's what we're cutting, period.
And when we cut it, I felt like this is either going to work in a huge way or it's going to ruin my career forever. Luckily, it worked.
And I think the fortunate thing, it worked. And I think that what kept me from being just sort of a novelty act that had this sort of funky weird song that made some noise was being able to come right behind it with Don't Take the Girl. So I think that I forever believe that the combination of those two songs is what set my career in motion and gave me momentum that I probably couldn't have gotten any other way.
How would you describe both of those songs as a one-two punch? The first one, for people who don't know, why was it potentially controversial or different?
Well, because it was stereotypical and it was sort of a play on Native American stereotypes.
And there was a lot of controversy around it and I understood the controversy and I wasn't upset about the controversy. In fact, I met with several Native American leaders.
Some liked the song, some didn't like the song. And my answer was, 'Look, I understand what your concerns are. The song's not meant to be that way. I understand your concerns. My opinion, if you need to go after me in order to raise attention and awareness to your cause, by all means, use my song for that. If you like it or don't like it, if you can make something good happen from it, then by all means, I'm not going to be offended.' And now when I play Native American casinos, when I meet with the elders or the chiefs before the show, I always say, you know, I have Indian Outlaw on my set, but I'm happy to take it out if it's offensive. And invariably 99.9% of the time they say that's why we hired you is to sing that song. So they love it. So it's been really good to me.
And what about the follow-up, the one-two?
Oh, the Don't Take the Girl.
That song was just so powerful and such a great story. It was the epitome of what country music is all about. A great story that gets right to the heart of the matter that hits right to the emotion that leaves it a little open-ended and makes you guess a little bit about what happened. But to this day, singing that song, there are times where it chokes me up still every time. And that song was one of my first stances as an artist to where I wasn't sure if I was doing the right thing or not, but it was my first opportunity to perform on the CMAs after Don't Take the Girl came out. And Walter was the guy who used to run the CMA. Remember Walter? They wanted me to do the girl, but they only gave me three minutes and the song's five minutes. And I was trying to explain to them that there's no way to sing this song without telling the complete story or it wouldn't make sense. So I actually turned down my first opportunity to perform on the CMAs because I couldn't do the whole song.
Was that an obvious choice or did you second guess that choice after you turned it down, you know, the next day or the next hour? Were you like, 'Ah...'
No. I just think it was an obvious choice.
Yeah. And I wasn't too worried because the song is doing so well and I just thought there's no upside here to doing part of this song. It's not going to do anything for me and it's not going to do anything for anybody else.
So, a few things come to mind for me. The first is that in a digital world or what we perceive to be virtual, folks try to do a lot virtually and you can do a lot in terms of testing and this that and the other thing but still if you can get in front of live audiences to test your material whether you are a musician, a comedian, even in my case as a writer, my first book was turned down 30 plus times by publishers. Not an exaggeration, but because I had taught the material in front of classes for years and years and years, I knew that it worked.
You had a practical sense that it worked.
I could see it and I'd honed it and I'd taken out the equivalent of jokes that didn't work. Double down on the ones that did. And that still is just so incredibly valuable, having that real-time feedback, especially when you're playing multiple times a night. So in your process when you're writing a book and you're talking about trying material out in front of people, do you have an idea or a nugget of what you want to do and then you just start riffing on it around people just to sort of get feedback?
I do. I would say that these days I will often test on the podcast to see like segments or parts exactly to see what resonates or doesn't resonate. So, for instance, I'm considering doing a huge collection of case studies from the first book because, of course, people hear The 4-Hour Workweek and they're like, 'Bullshit. That guy is a liar.' And I get it. I get it. It's a controversial title and deliberately so, but there are hundreds and thousands of case studies. And so, for every reason someone might have why they object to the title, I'm a single mom. I've got five kids. I have this. I have that. I'm 60 and not 20. I have an example that has walked the walk in their shoes. Right.
So, that said, a book is a huge commitment. I still find writing so difficult and I know you've had experience with this. So, I will put together a few episodes on the podcast where I'm basically testing different sets of questions with case studies and I'm going to see, all right, look, I enjoy doing this, but how does the audience respond?
Mhm. At the same time, I would say for me, I think it's very dangerous to ask your audience or really anyone if you have developed a creative muscle and you value it, 'What should I do?' Because then you can get shaped by the masses in a way that really leads you down, I think, a lost path. In my case, I might have two or three things I'm excited about. Then it's a question, which of these three?
And I will feel good about any of these three. Then it's okay.
So, I test that. I still think to this day, and I've thought about potentially approaching UT Austin to do a class because the feedback is so fast, they can't fake it. Even if they say they like it, if you look at their face and they are spacing out, checking their phone, you're like, mm, not working.
Like you said, you try things out. Musicians, comedians, writers, I do the same thing. If I run across a new song that I really like, have the band work it up and say, 'Let's play it a couple of times live and see what the reaction is.' Now, there's a caveat to that because when I've been doing this for 35 years now, so when you have songs people expect to hear and then you throw a new one in on them, sometimes the reaction is not exactly what you want it to be, but it's not necessarily the reaction that you're going to get if they know the song. There's a little bit of a curve that you have to put on it when you're doing it. Back again also to not letting the audience determine what you do. That's really true because like you say, you can get lost. If you start chasing what you think people want to hear, I think you're in trouble. I think you're in trouble. I think you got to chase what you want to hear and what you want to play. And look, my taste is not going to match up with everybody's taste and probably less and less people's taste as the days go forward. Who knows? It may grow more. I don't know. But I have to cut stuff that speaks to me. If it doesn't speak to me, especially if I didn't write it, if it doesn't speak to me and I can't interpret it in a way that speaks from my heart and speaks to someone else, if it doesn't speak to me first, there's no way I'm going to make it speak to somebody else.
It turns into a guessing game.
And people can spot that a mile away.
Whether they realize it or not, they can. It just strikes me how similar if you're pursuing creative expression and longevity. By the way, in so many disciplines, it's the same thing.
It is just the same thing, right? Whether it's a podcast, whether it's music, whether it's writing.
Kurt Vonnegut, one of my favorite writers, hilarious cat, Breakfast of Champions, etc. People can pick up any of his books. They're really fun to read. And he used to say along the lines, I'm paraphrasing, but if you open up the window and try to make love to the world, you're going to catch the flu. Basically catch the flu. If you're trying to appeal to everybody, you're lost.
And at least you know you have an audience of one if it's resonating with you. And the personal can be so universal.
Well, and again, we're so lucky as artists, writers, musicians, whatever you are as an artist because that's therapy.
You have your own built-in therapeutic machine.
So there's the aspect of creative longevity, right? How many years you've been doing this again?
35, I guess, somewhere around there.
35. All right. So 35 years. So you have creative longevity. How do you continue to follow the right scent trail which is very personal and not get lost because there's going to be a lot of temptation, a lot of external forces, expectations, right? So there's that which we've spoken to a bit. Physically, I know a lot of people are going to want me to talk about this. I want to talk about it. How do you think about physically being capable to do what you do? I mean, you are still performing.
That is intensely physical.
I have never performed as a musician on stage, but I know a few. And it's even when you're not running around, it's physical.
Yeah. It's the energy that you're expending. And in my case, I can't sit still when I'm performing. I'm all over the place. But yeah, focus is the biggest word I think in my vocabulary when it comes to what I do for a living. Because the times where I'm not focused are the times things aren't working.
And I tell you that the last three years have been tough to focus with surgeries.
I've had four back surgeries and double knee replacements.
And tried to work through all of it and did work through all of it. But there was a moment in time back in the spring this year after my third back surgery or was it last year, all the years running together anyway, after my third back surgery when it just didn't work that I thought that I was going to really be looking at not being able to do this anymore because I can't imagine not doing it the way that I do it. Right? There's no way that I'm going to go out there and sit on a stool and sing for an hour and a half. It's physically impossible for me to do.
And I don't know that anybody wants to see that from me.
And so if I can't go do the shows the way I do shows and the way that I have fun doing shows, then I'm not going to give everybody what they're paying for and I'm not going to get satisfaction out of it. There was a time where until the last back surgery that actually worked, knock on wood, that I didn't think I was going to be able to make it back and not make it back the way I wanted to make it back.
But now my focus is back. My body's back. My brain fog's clearing up from all the anesthesia. So, I'm feeling like I'm back on a good path. I'm actually feeling like I've got a second wind now and something to prove, which is good for me because I need that. I want to be the underdog. I want to be, you know, the guy nobody expects for it to work. You know, I want to be that guy.
Make yourself a little hungry.
Yeah, absolutely. Metaphorically. And literally, when I'm working, I like to be hungry. I don't like to eat before I go on stage because I like to be hungry for that reason because metaphorically it works for me.
I just had my first real experience with falconry. And the falconer was very clear. He's like, 'You need that bird to be hungry if you want it to hunt.' It will not perform otherwise. If you're fed, you're not going to do much. And actually, fed up is an expression taken from falconry because if the bird is fed up, it won't listen to you.
Ah, fed up from falconry. I hope to remember that. It's just a good little piece of knowledge. I love those little details.
There are all these little words from hoodwinked also when they put the hood on. Also from falconry. So focusing in Tribe of Mentors, you mentioned my gym is how I get refocused. That's my meditation. And you talked about this five rounds of 12 exercise with the bar complex kind of adding weight and then going back down.
Do you still do that or has your training changed over time? You also mentioned a pool workout. I'm not sure if you still do that, but what is the training regimen? What has it looked like and what does it look like now? Well, maybe it's changed.
It's changed a little bit. I have to be a lot more deliberate and a lot more careful. I'm sure that my workout routine, my three workouts a day and that's three workouts a day. That's what I did for a long time, especially on the road touring.
Wow. Was that just like before breakfast, before lunch, before dinner?
Yeah. And they were distinctly different exercises. And the afternoon exercise was sort of an outdoor CrossFit thing with the whole band. So that was like an hour and a half. Then I would do my two-hour workout in the morning which was mostly weights.
Mostly weights and some cardio. And then before lunch would be running the arena or stadium stairs and doing a discipline at the top of each stairs.
A pushup or squat or an ab or something. So you run all the stairs. Then we take a break and eat, take a nap or whatever. And then at 2:00, 2:30 we go out for an hour and a half and do the outside stuff.
A border collie. You need to work dogs. Got to run.
That being said, I'm sure that I hastened all of my injuries. But I remember specifically when it happened, it was 1883. When we shot 1883, that was pretty physically demanding and that wore us out pretty good. That was six months, six days a week, 16 hours a day pretty much solid. And at the time, I was doing shows while we were doing because I'd had shows booked. So, I would work filming till 7:00, run and jump on a plane, go to a show, get back at 3:00 in the morning or 2:00 in the morning, get up at 4:00, try to get a workout in, and then be in the makeup trailer, go to the next day.
Can't imagine why he wore himself out.
Not only was I tired though, I was strangely uncomfortable on stage during that because I had this big beard on and people didn't know what I was doing because we were filming a show that wasn't out yet. So people didn't know what I was doing. And I'd put on about...
No, I didn't. I tried to a couple times, but nobody... Then I'd put on, you know, about 10 pounds of weight because there's just protein everywhere. So I mean, it wasn't fat or anything, but I was working out, steady work, but they always had steak and stuff. So...
Wasn't fat for people who haven't seen the series. I mean, that hotel scene with kind of like the pajamas or whatever it is. Anyone else want to [__] with my family? You do not look fat.
But I'm standing on stage and I got this big dyed black beard and I'm thinking these people are thinking that I'm dying my beard to look young because my beard's gray. I mean my beard's snow white and I had this big black beard on. So I was just so uncomfortable on stage and worn out and tired of...
Were you uncomfortable because it didn't feel right to you or because you knew the audience was a little off-kilter?
It didn't feel right to me and I could tell that they were trying to figure out what the hell was going on too. It was uncomfortable, but we got through them and it wore us out. And I tweaked myself a little bit a few times with my knee. And I'd had some knee trouble before. And at 20 I had a meniscus done on my scoped on my left knee. And at 30 I had a meniscus on my right knee. But they hadn't bothered me. Everybody and I think my problem is I have really high pain tolerance. I remember specifically we were in Montreal and I think it was three weeks into the tour, maybe four weeks into the tour. We were in Montreal and my knees were hurting, my back was hurting, things were starting to fall apart and I remember turning, just a normal turn, and felt both my knees just felt like they exploded. And I went to bed that night and I woke up the next morning and from my hips to my ankles, my legs were twice the size that they were before I went to sleep, swollen.
Yeah. And so I got up, went to the gym. So, I spent two years in the gym just on a treadmill doing anything I could to try to stay in shape where I had to lean over the treadmill to walk because I couldn't stand up straight just to get walking in.
And then doing the show, we finished out the tour where they literally had to carry me backstage. I'd get on stage, fake it through the show without acting like I was limping too badly. And then they would carry me back to the bus after the show. And then right after that tour, I had to spend a month just sort of prepping myself for surgery and then I went straight in and had the double knee replacements.
And then another back surgery after that.
You know, I don't want to turn this into a Tim Ferriss confessional, but the pain tolerance you mentioned having high pain tolerance like blessing and a curse because I've had multiple. Just had elbow surgery a few months ago, which I should have had probably 15 years ago.
I just kept like, I'll walk it off. It's fine. And you know shoulder reconstruction and I won't turn this into like my litany of complaints about things but I just did but the well the back in particular you know I've had crippling back issues for the last three to five years which were precipitated by this crazy accident long ago where I basically caught a huge dresser falling off the loading bay of a shipping truck because I wanted to prevent it from shattering on the ground and it twisted my body around and basically like tore my hat off of my body. It was a horrifying accident. But I suppose looking back because I've wondered this. I have a friend. His name is Kevin Kelly, founding editor of Wired magazine. Great guy. I would say for his entire life has basically done, no offense Kevin, no exercise except for lots of walking. That's it. Lots of walking. He has, as far as I can tell, no aches and pains.
Well, walking is the best exercise.
He's in his got to be early to mid-70s now. And so I look back and I'm like, I wonder what I would have done differently. Like because I had a lot of intense training back in the day. Used to compete in judo and all these various things. Took quite a few lumps from all that. And I look back and I'm like, 'All right, what would I have done differently?' I think there are certain things I would have toned down. Probably would have given a slightly different prescription. Would have still been pretty aggressive because I don't know if I would be where I am now otherwise without that. So looking back over the decades, right? What would you have changed about your training in retrospect? If anything,
I would have been smarter about it probably.
Well, I would have trained less for sure and paid more attention to small aches and pains instead of waiting until they were debilitating.
Big aches and pains. I would have waited for that. Although, as you said, I honestly believe that if I hadn't decided that I was just going to get myself back in shape because I'd always stayed in shape, but you know, after having kids and stuff, you know, you're eating chicken nuggets all the time and you know, so I sort of let myself go for a little while and then I did a movie called Four Christmases, which I've never seen, still haven't seen to this day.
Because I think I weighed 215 when we shot that movie. How much do you weigh now?
But we went to see another movie and I'd taken my kids and they were small and completely not even thinking about my movie. And of course the very first trailer that pops up is Four Christmases, the movie that I just done. And my face pops on the screen. And my daughter looked at the screen and looked at me. She said, 'Geez, Dad, you need to do something.' Because it looked like you could stick a pen in me and I would have just flew across the room. And that's when I decided to get back in shape. But I do think that, and people will argue with me about this, but I believe it to my core, that had I not done that and decided to change my lifestyle, changed my workout routine, the way I looked and took care of myself, that I don't think my career would have lasted this long.
Early 40s. 42, 43, somewhere around.
Yeah. I mean, that's insane, man. You hear this, I'm sure, from lots of people, but you are in great I mean, you look like you're in great shape, and not hitting on you, but...
But what has your workout looked like? And I won't belabor this too much longer, but it's I feel like mind, body, brain, these are all the same thing. They're all a superorganism. And the exercise is a fundamental pillar of all of it for me and for you, I suspect. So, what has your exercise regimen looked like for the last, let's call it, year?
Year. Well, there was about six weeks where I didn't do anything at all, which was almost impossible for me to do.
And that's probably why some of my back surgeries didn't work as well as they should have because I tried to go back too soon.
That's the story of my right meniscus, too. I've tried to cut it down to two hours a day, but that includes I usually walk an hour or 30 minutes to warm up for my knees to get going, my back to get. So, walking's always my start out whether it's 30 minutes or an hour just to walk to loosen everything up and do a lot of body weight stuff and a lot of stretching. I never lift heavy weights. I don't do heavy weights at all. I try not to do deadlifts anymore because of my back. Although the doc says I can do them light, but I'm still scared of them.
So, I do a lot of body weight stuff and a lot of circuit training and then just try to do everything I do with intent and purpose and discipline and make sure everything's lined up properly before I... I never would do that. I knew what I was doing. I've had some good trainers in my life. So, I knew what I...
was doing, but you know, you get in a hurry and you fall back and start doing the same old stuff and you don't think, you don't put your head into what you're doing. I just have to be a lot more conscious about how I move and what I do.
And are those two hours all in the morning, typically?
In the morning, yeah. If I don't do it in the morning, it's tough for me to do it. And then that also includes because the older you get, especially with injuries, you got to really try to get every advantage you can get. So I do a lot of red light therapy, red light hot therapy, steam, cold plunges. So I do a lot of that. So that's, you know, that's a good 30 minutes at the end of the workout to get all that stuff in. So I do multiple circuits of that.
We have a similar recipe and two or three of the smartest athletes and trainers I know who used to be absolute monsters in the gym. I mean, they are power cleaning 300, 400 lb. I mean, just monsters.
Front squatting 400, 500 lb, and now they do lighter weights. These are guys now, I would say, kind of late 40s, early 50s. They do lighter weights. They use blood flow restriction cuffs and they are in fantastic shape. They've lost a little bit of muscle mass because they're not eating like 12 chickens a day.
But that's fine. Probably good for your longevity, too.
For sure. And my goal in the gym is I never want to be big. I don't want to be a big muscle cube on stage.
No, I want to be athletic. Yeah. The whole big muscle thing, I don't want to, I'm not going to fall into that. I'm too skinny for that anyway.
Yeah. I think there's a point where probably as a musician it just raises more eyebrows and more distracting than helpful.
So let's go way, way back as promised, my delayed gratification for the audience. Sorry it took me this long, guys, but the exercise for me is so present every single day.
Mhm. And would love to talk, maybe after our recording we can talk more, but for the deadlift, for instance, like Zercher deadlifts or Zercher squats where you're holding the barbell in front, really has protected my back in an interesting way for a lot of good reasons, but we'll see if we come back to that.
If we go way, way back.
Far enough that I can remember.
Oh, you'll remember, you'll remember. So could you tell the story of finding your birth certificate?
Oh God. Yeah. Wow. I'd gotten home from school.
How old were you at that time?
11. I was 11. And mom had kept in her closet like a Crown Royal bag that was full of coins. But she always put it in different places because we were always, because when I was going, you know, you had the concession stand at school for a quarter you could get a candy bar back then or like 10 cents you could get a Coke.
Just so people can put you in space. Where were you at the time?
In Louisiana. A little town, Start, Louisiana, where I grew up. Little farming community. It's just a caution light and a cotton gin. That's where I grew up. And so I was looking for the little bag trying to find some quarters or something to go buy a candy bar at the store or something. And I found the bag and there was a box right next to it. Opened the box and right on top was my birth certificate.
And I didn't think much of it and I started looking at it and I saw McGraw where a line had been drawn through it and right above it written by hand in pencil was Smith, which was my stepdad's name. And then it said dad's occupation, professional baseball player. And of course, being 11 years old and growing up, you know, sort of, we were like low, low middle class and, you know, didn't have any money and seeing something like that, it was just so hard to register. It didn't seem real. And oddly enough, I had three baseball cards on my wall in my room. His was one of them because he was one of my favorite players.
Yeah. So I instantly called my mom and I could tell that it hit her like a ton of bricks. She was at work and I'm like, 'Mom, what is this? What does this mean?' And then she was like, 'Oh my God.' That's all she said. And she said, 'I'll be right home.' And then she came home and we went for a ride and she told me the whole story.
Her junior summer in high school and her mom had just left her dad, my grandpa, and they were staying in a motel that had an outdoor pool, you know, like a motor court motel that my grandmother and my mom were staying there. But it just so happened that the minor league team, Jacksonville Suns, minor league team for the Mets, all the ballplayers were staying in that hotel as well. So Tug and my mom met at the pool and sort of dated over the summer. And when he left, got called up or whatever, left, she found out she was pregnant.
My mom was a dancer and she had just gotten invited to try out for Where the Action Is by Dick Clark, which was like his first show, the precursor to American Bandstand and all that stuff. So my mom had just gotten a letter inviting her to audition for it. And she had just found out she was pregnant with me. And then I have her senior portrait that she took that they always take at the beginning of the senior year. And she had just found out two days before the senior portrait she was pregnant with me. And every time I look at that portrait, I can see it in her eyes. I can see that her whole future had just disappeared in front of her.
And she told me the whole story and said that she hadn't talked to him since and hasn't heard from him. And I said, 'But I'd like to meet him, you know.' So she got in touch with his lawyer somehow or his agent somehow and he was still playing at the time and they arranged somehow, mom borrowed a car from her boss and some money from her boss. He said he would leave tickets for us and have lunch with us.
And we drove there. He met us for lunch. We talked for a little while.
And he just said, 'You know, I'm not your dad. I don't think I'm your dad, but we can be friends,' kind of deal. And went to the game. I had a Pete Rose magazine where Pete Rose was about to break the hitting record that I brought with me and he took me in the clubhouse and Pete Rose signed that. So I got to meet Pete Rose. Got to throw the ball a little bit with some of the guys for batting practice. And my mom had got me a McGraw shirt made and a Phillies hat and all that stuff. So she had me all decked out. We met, never saw him after the game or anything. Never heard from him again. So of course, I was obsessed as an 11-year-old kid would be about something like that.
Could I pause you for one second? What were the emotions that you felt at the time? Was there anger? Was there confusion? Was there admiration? What was the mixture of emotions that you felt?
I think at the time, I don't think there was anger. I think there was some affirmation in it because we grew up in a very dysfunctional life. The guy who I thought was my dad growing up was an alcoholic and very abusive to my mom and to me. And then the second stepdad was worse than the first one. So we grew up in really scary, you know, the commercial you see now when footsteps are coming home and kids are scared. That's the way our house was when you'd hear the truck drive up. So for me, there was an affirmation of why I felt like I didn't belong with that guy.
So it wasn't a confusion. I don't think I was young enough to register confusion. I think it was more certainly about the excitement of finding out that your dad's a professional baseball player and certainly in the circumstances that I was growing up in. So for me it was sort of a ray of light in a lot of ways. So the next year they were playing in Houston again and I asked mom if I could go see the game again. She got in touch with the agent again, said he would leave two tickets but he's not going to see us. So he left two tickets and then it was in Houston, which was the only time I'd seen him play. Cut to the first time I saw him play. He came in and gave up a grand slam the first time I saw him play. But the bullpen is right along, right by the stands. I mean, the stands are to that desk where the bullpen is.
Yeah, you're right there. He wouldn't see us before the game or anything. So he was warming up in the bullpen and my mom says, 'Why don't you go down and say hi to him? He's warming up in the bullpen.' So I walked down to where he was warming up and I was as close to him as you were to him and he's warming up. So I'm yelling at him, 'Tug, it's Tim. Tug.' And he wouldn't look at me. He wouldn't look at me or acknowledge me. And so I just sort of dropped it for that. Went back home. I didn't use McGraw, used Smith. Just sort of forgot about it, didn't forget about it, but not even only a handful of my friends even knew about it.
I didn't tell very many people about it. Sort of. Then I got embarrassed, I think, after that, that I was just like sort of thrown away.
What happened? What changed?
Well, when I was 18, graduating high school, we didn't have any money for college. I was counting on sports scholarships and I had a few, but I was small. I graduated high school, I was 5'10" barely and 140 pounds and, you know, getting football scholarships and basketball scholarships, thinking this probably going to work out when I get to the next level at my size. She was going to call about paying for college. See if she could see if he would pay for college. This is a long story. She's going to see if he'd pay for college. So...
I was staying out of it. I, you know, I was too busy with my life. And then I remember the last high school football game. I'm getting ready. I'm down on the field getting ready for the game to start. We'd already ran through the banner and done all that stuff. And somebody taps me on the shoulder and it was my mom. I'm on the sidelines getting ready to go out and play. I'm like, 'Mom, what are you doing here? You know, we're about to play a game. You can't be down here on the sideline.' She goes, 'Well, I heard from Tug's lawyer today.' And I said, 'Okay, mom, can we wait till after the game?' We get home to talk about this. So played the game, got home, and we talked a little bit about it. And then we talked about it the next morning. And the deal was they'd sent a contract. They said that he would pay $300 a year towards my college and that I would never be able to contact him again and if I did, money would... anyway, $300 a year for college and you can't contact me anymore. And that to me was enough to say, you know what, fine. My only request is I don't even need the money. $300 a month is not going to do anything. I don't need the money. Don't need anything. My only request is that he has to meet with me one last time and then if he wants me to sign a contract to leave him alone, I'll do whatever. And so we drove to Houston. He had retired at this point and I just graduated high school. So I was as tall as him and we walked into the hotel and mom said, 'Well, there's Tug standing checking in over there.' And he had somebody with him who was his lawyer/agent. So I walked over to him and tapped him on the shoulder and he turned around and looked at me and said, 'Hi, Tug. I'm Tim.' Because he hadn't seen me since I was 11. And I introduced myself to the guy standing next to him. And the guy standing next to him turned completely white because I looked just like him. So he knew that the gig was up.
So we sort of spent the day together hanging out a little bit. And then we went to dinner that night, he, mom, and I. And then there was a point during dinner, the small talk, where I asked mom if she could leave us alone and let us talk for a minute. And of course, mom didn't want to do that. And I assured her that I had this, this was fine. And as soon as she left, I just looked at Tug and said, 'Look, I'll sign your contract. I'll never talk to you again. I won't bother you. I just have one question for you.' And I asked him, 'Do you think you're my dad?' And he says, 'Yes, I believe I am.' And he said, 'We'll tear the contract up.' And then I didn't hear from him for a year after that.
But after that, we ended up starting to see more of each other. And me going, while I was in college, I would drive up to Philly and visit and got to know my little brother Mark and my little sister Carrie, which was great to come out of that. But I always, this is what I'll get back to at the end of the day. I get asked a lot and you said it right. A lot of people now don't know the story. They knew it at the beginning of my career, but a lot of people that know my career now that know who my dad was, they think that I grew up in that world and I didn't. So I'm glad we're talking about this because a lot of people can understand now that I didn't grow up in that world. But the long and short of it is when people ask, 'How could you have anything to do with your dad? How could you have not hated him? How could you have just not turned your back on him?' My answer always is he gave me something that was so precious.
And that was hope.
Whether he meant to and he didn't or knew it or any of those things, he gave me a reason to think that I can get out of the situation that I was in. That if he can do that, then I have it in me to do something. And so for that reason alone, I couldn't hate him. Hope, man.
Yeah. But it's just a bedrock of everything else.
If everything else is gone, if you got hope, you still got a chance.
Remember talking to a friend of mine. He's got a couple of kids now. Now mostly grown. Think about it. I mean, the older I get, the younger people seem, but yeah, they're adults.
We went for a hike at one point. He's just a really sweet, very smart guy. And I asked him, I'm like, 'All right, what would your advice be to an aspiring parent, me, I don't yet have any kids, but I really am looking forward to that, building a family.' He said, 'It's really simple. Your job is to love your kids. They don't owe you anything. It's not their job to love you.'
Number two, you have to teach them to be optimistic.
Those two things make perfect sense. Your vision of their life and your expectations of their life. Don't let it cloud your love and guidance for them.
Yeah, I have lots of questions about family because it's top of mind for me. But I want to ask you about guitars. Here's why.
Because I was looking up on the way here, Yo-Yo Ma, famous cello player.
Picked up cello. Probably got handed a cello at age four.
All right. My understanding is you did not do that.
So how did this music thing come about?
Well, the music thing came about because of my mom's love for music.
Because from my earliest memory, the time I can remember, my mom was always singing and playing records around the house and always had the radio wide open. So I knew every song on the radio and she would encourage me to sing. She always wanted me to sing along with her on the radio. So I knew every song on the radio. Would sing with my mom all the time. We'd walk around the house singing, singing in church. I mean, my friends used to give me a hard time all the time playing baseball. I played shortstop and the whole time I'm out there, I'm singing songs and playing around. So I was always singing to the point where my sisters were always like, 'Shut up. Just shut up. Just stop singing.' And I still do it to this day. Somebody can say a word and I'll sing a song that's got that word in it. It's just in me. I can't get it out. But I was in the same category that you were thinking that, you know, the guys you hear on the radio are guys that have been doing this since they were three or four years old. They're trained musicians. They're guys that...
Yeah. This is something you can't just do unless you're trained to do it since you were a little kid. So I got into college. That's when I realized when I got into college and went out for the first football sort of roundup and to see everybody, when I looked around and thought, 'All right, I'm going to get killed. I'm going to be on the practice squad, never see the field, and get the hell beat out of me and spend all of my time here.' So I ended up not playing ball, joined a fraternity, pawned my high school ring, and bought a guitar for 20 bucks.
Why did you decide to get the guitar?
Because I thought I love music. I love singing. Chicks might dig it if I got a guitar and learned to play a few songs.
Okay. So it wasn't so far ahead as to how...
No, I wasn't thinking about moving to Nashville. It wasn't a career move. It was a move, but it wasn't a career move. And I thought, you know, I could play some clubs around town. It'd be fun to do. I even thought, look, my biggest dream I could have here is get a house gig somewhere where I'm making money every week and playing music.
And remind me, where were you at the time?
I was in Louisiana, Monroe.
At Northeast Louisiana, which is ULM now, but back then it was Northeast Louisiana University. So I bought the guitar and all of my friends had moved away for the summer. It's my freshman summer of college. I had a job where I worked four hours a day at a plant nursery in the mornings just moving stuff and I'd come home and just I'd watch CMT and watch where their fingers were on the guitars.
Yeah, early YouTube. And then on music sheets it had these little guitar fret things where it would show you where your fingers went. So I spent a lot of years where my fingers were in the wrong position, but I would still make the chord. And my buddies, my roommates would hide my guitar for the longest time because I was so bad. But then when I started getting pretty good at it, they would hide it. I couldn't find it. But when chicks would come over to the house, they would grab my guitar and bring it to me and want me to start playing songs.
Exactly. So over that summer, I learned about 50 songs and I just started playing just me and a guitar at this little catfish house called [__] of the Walk. And that was my first gig and that's how I paid my rent for a while. And by the way, I am still a terrible guitar player.
I can play well enough to write my songs and it's like...
Made it work for you.
When was the first inkling or the first sign, feeling maybe, where you're like, 'Okay, I think this could be a thing'?
First off, the encouragement I got from my friends in college, my fraternity buddies, that could go either way when you're trying to play guitar and sing songs from your buddies in a fraternity. That could go the wrong way. But when it didn't, when they were encouraging me and they were giving me credit and telling me how good I was, to me that was a big deal for a bunch of guys, your friends to tell you that when you're just trying to figure it out and you don't even know anything about it really, for them to tell you that you're good and they want to hear you do it and they ask you to sing all the time. So when I started playing clubs and stuff, I would get good reaction from the crowds and then the owners would come over and say, 'Hey, would you want to come back and, you know, you guys are the best band we've had.' You know, stuff like that. And then I took a military science class.
Military science, like strategy and studying generals?
Yeah. And I got to know the instructor, Captain Whitehead was his name. He was an army guy and head of the ROTC and everything there. And all the guys in the class were ROTC guys.
And anyway, we took the class and it was tactics and we were in the field doing stuff. We'd spend a weekend tracking and doing all the stuff with rappelling, you know, all kinds of stuff. It was a great course. And at the end of the course, everybody was asked to vote who was our platoon leader. Well, I got voted by all the ROTC guys as the platoon leader for the class for the year. So I was the top student in the class. And so Captain Whitehead took a big, big interest in me, but he thought I should be a Marine. So he kept taking me to the Marine recruiting office. So I visited the Marine Recruiting Office quite a bit, filled out all my paperwork, and one night I decided I had everything packed. I sold everything I had. Sold my car, water skis, shotguns. Sold everything I had. I think I ended up with about $3,000. I had my guitar, one suitcase, and my Marine paperwork sitting on my dresser. And I said, 'When I wake up in the morning, I'll decide whether I'm going to move to Nashville or join the Marines.' And I fell asleep. Woke up the next morning, looked over, got up, picked up the Marine paper, tore it up, put it in the garbage, and went and bought a Greyhound bus ticket and ended up in Nashville.
I have so many questions.
Why did Captain Whitehead think you should be a Marine?
I don't know. I guess because I did well in the class and we got along well. He kept coming to our fraternity house and hanging out with us. We just got along well and he liked me. As a matter of fact, we played, it had to have been 15 years later after I had a lot of success. We played the base in San Diego, military base in San Diego and it was huge. It was packed and I'm singing and playing. I'm standing in the front of the stage and I look down and Captain Whitehead's right at the front of the stage and I got to say hi to him and talk to him a little bit afterwards. He just says, 'You would have been a good Marine. You missed the boat, son.' No, I didn't. I'm kidding.
The platoon leader piece is interesting to me. What do you think, even if you had to speculate, why did that happen? Why did they vote you platoon leader?
