What you just described sounds very buoyant and positive, but then there was the darker side. Was it hard for you to make sense of both the light and the dark in your family? Early on it wasn’t so bad. By the time I was old enough to remember stuff, like 4 years old, my parents were doing pretty good. There were just some Busch Lights and a few joints here and there. It wasn’t anything hard or crazy. So my early childhood was really beautiful and surrounded by music and friends. Then it just started to go downhill. My dad lost his job, and we started struggling more financially. That was at the same time that my parents were falling into addiction. I moved out when I was 13. I was trying to guilt-trip them into seeing what they were doing. There wasn’t any food. My house was no longer a home. So I took off. When I realized that me moving out wasn’t going to change anything, that’s when I was like: “Oh, no. Now I’m actually kind of homeless.” So then I had to just figure it out. But I never disowned my parents or cut ties with them, and it actually became this era of trying things myself. I could show up at their house with several carloads of minors and half gallons of whiskey, and they couldn’t tell me no. My dad would always be like, You’re not having all these minors drink in here. I’m like, OK, well, what are you going to do, call the cops? So I eventually just started partying with them. You know, when you lose people to addiction like that, especially as a young kid, you almost wonder: What is so powerful that basically took them from me? That’s actually what the song “Turmoil & Tinfoil” is about. I was staring right at my mother, but I missed her, she’s not herself anymore. Her soul and her beautiful vibrancy is gone. It’s just this gray shell of a person that is really sick. So you wonder: What is this stuff all about? I was 16 the first time I smoked meth with my mom. And around that time is when I started doing coke and speed and trying crack. And then a couple of years after that, I got to wondering about my biological father. I never knew him, and I always thought, Man, he must have loved heroin more than me. I wondered what was so good that it was better than me. So that’s when I tried heroin, because I just had to see what it was all about. I got a lot of that stuff out of my system early on. I never really got hooked on anything because I was always surrounded by tweakers and junkies. I saw how bad these people’s lives were, and I never wanted to let myself get that far.
When you were younger and partying with your parents, I would bet that there was some part of you inside that felt conflicted or uncomfortable with it. Did you and your parents ever talk about that period in your life? No, it was just what it was. Sometimes we’d get high and I would play guitar with my dad until the sun came up. We’re bonding again and that felt good.
When did you realize that you had a real gift for the guitar? That was early on. I started playing when I was about 4 years old. By the time I was 6 or 7, I could carry a tune, and I was my dad’s rhythm player. He would play all the lead and do all the fancy picking and singing, and I would hold down the rhythm. One of the biggest moments for me was I was sitting in my dad’s bedroom with him, as I would basically do every night, and he was teaching me the song “Beaumont Rag.” We would play the tune and I would mess up the second part every time. And I stopped us right in the middle of the song and said, “Why don’t you just play it and let me listen?” And so that’s what we did. Instead of trying to count, I listened to what he was playing. I listened to the melody. Then I was like, “All right, let me try it again,” and I nailed it. He was awful proud. He called my grandma, made her listen on the phone. That was a big moment for me. That’s when this listening thing started: I was able to listen to the music more intently and I could tell what chord was coming next. I used to think it was magic or something. I had no concept of music theory or anything. But my dad would play a G chord and then he would play a G seventh and my ear would just lead me. I’d be like, Well, the next chord’s probably going to be a C, and then it would be. It’s better to learn bluegrass and folk and hillbilly music that way than to try to learn from some academic point of view. It’s better to learn it on the back porch and to let it get under your skin, because then it’s not some equation, it’s a feeling. It comes from your soul.
