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

35:59And I'm not as like sacred about every word's got to be mine. Like, you know, I'm very... Writing is my passion almost more than singing. So, like, you know, I'm very particular of, like, what I want the songs to say and sound like. And I don't know, I just like writing. Would you ever do it for someone else? I think so. But it's... Maybe. I don't think I could write... I don't think I could write a song for someone else that I think that I could sing. Because I just want to sing it. The supplement industry is full of products making claims that they can't back, which is why I'm such a massive fan of Momentus.

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37:08If you don't love it, they will give you your money back. Plus, they ship internationally. Right now, you get up to 35 % off your first subscription and that 30-day money-back guarantee by going to the link in the description below. We're heading to livemomentus.com slash modernwisdom and using the code modernwisdom at checkout. That's L-I-V-E-M-O-M-E-N-T-O-U-S.com slash modernwisdom and modernwisdom at checkout. Well, I had Bellion on the show last year and he's just so fucking i mean there was a guitar in the back side of the room and i'm thinking okay john motherfucking bellion okay right i gestured to a guitar yay you know explain how he did he looked at it he was i don't know i played that thing no way well he's like i fucking it's not my it's not my bag yeah i'm just here to do the thing yeah but he was telling me about how he'd taken all of his time off five years maybe this big break away from producing any publishing any music himself and he just wasn't fussed he had this altercation pretty public altercation i think with his label didn't want to i'm not going to play the game i'm just going to make music for other people and this would be great and he's just creating banger after banger and i said well how did you know that you wanted to get back into making music again he said well when i had my stack of tracks to show whichever artist was coming in like little demos and stuff that i'd cut together for them to have a little listen to, I'd find myself going down, going down.

38:29And then I'd double tap over the top of a couple of them. And he was like, that one's for me. And he could hear in the back of his mind, this bit of almost kind of a selfishness or maybe a bit more swagger or kind of ownership coming back in because he wanted to do that. But yeah, I think about a lot of my friends that are writers, they do versions of ghost writing for people and they'll shape ideas and then sometimes they'll come up with the synthesis of an idea and every so often they put out one they feel a little bit of grief that they didn't get to put it under their own name and the same goes for comedy writers you know all of the roasts that you see every big roast that you see online a lot of comedians now are opening up in the caption of their instagram post if they put one of these huge big like you know clips up that completely rips they put the credits in that of all of the writers that have contributed it's not them i'm right here right jared like this is because i i always thought it was like i always thought it was like rap and comedy like the country was like the country and pop were like they had writers yeah i i thought like i thought like rap comedy was more like you are what you write no i mean what percentage of comedians now touring comedians do you think are using just off the top of your head what percentage of touring comedians do you think are doing their entire sets less than 10 no way that is crazy at the roasts i would probably guess probably less it's our it's fucking armies of people to put this together i mean i mean you'll even hear them call it out now shane at uh the espies just gave a line and he said i that wasn't mine i didn't write that one like he's calling out the meta of the whole engine process and um yeah i saw i saw another roast that came out a couple of days ago and the fucking instagram captions 10 lines long it's crazy like writers and then other contributors you know it's got the dog in there like everybody's you could say you could say the writer's room it's good it's not nashville credits or else your kid would be like tapping you up saying hey yeah i was in the room when yeah you're in the year was my 33 yeah yeah dude it's wow yeah i don't know i i think what you said earlier i take ownership yeah and i try i don't think i'm a very egotistical person but the one thing i think i do like take pride in the most is probably the words and it's just i don't know it also just if somebody i'm trying to think like if someone came up to me with just an absolute amazing song and it was like do you want to sing this i've never had that i've never had that except for blake my brother with rambling and i was like that's a no-brainer let's put that on the album maybe it feels a little different that it's come from so close yeah yeah and i guess mate or even or even if it's a person that's just like a really great songwriter and like i had this song when you sing it i'm like cool i can't you know let's do it i'll do it but what about in reverse what about you writing for someone else again i i think it's the ownership thing like i I think if I write a song that I think is just so good, I almost get to the point where like, if I have a chorus and like a verse and all I need is like a little bridge and I'm almost like, I'm sorry, like I really don't want help with this.

41:44Because you want to own it. I want this to be like, yeah, I want to complete my thought. So that's a really interesting point. And I've found this with writing that there is always, at least now in the world of writing and maybe increasingly it's going to start creeping in in the world of music, the contribution of AI. so I've got this idea that I'm I'm playing with at the moment I have a friend and he bumped into an ex of his a little while ago and he made the decision that he didn't want to be in a relationship anymore a good while back and he was certainly really done the work spent a lot of time thinking about whether or not he wanted to to leave decided to leave saw her gets completely knocked sideways just bumps into her randomly and his head's in a whole spin.

42:27And he was saying, I can't work out how I was so certain at the time and so regretful now. And there's an idea from psychology that's called the fading affect bias. And what it says is that bad memories fade with time, but good ones don't tend to. And that's great because it means we have a psychological immune system. It protects us from being still at the mercy of some horrible thing that happened in our past. Your dog dies when you're 10, but when you're 15, it doesn't sing quite so much. Hooray for that. You have a psychological immune system. You distance yourself. You distract yourself. You have reframes.

43:02Tragedy plus time equals comedy is about as close to an algorithm that psychology's got. So bad things fade with time. Good things tend not to so much. And in fact, sometimes bad things can kind of become funny. You can have a tragic situation that becomes funny in future. But one of the weird side effects of this, as you get a little bit older, is that you assume wisdom compounds with age. As I get older, I know more. But in matters of emotion, as you get older, you're just further from the evidence. So what he had encountered was a situation where a future version of him had less information than a previous version of him.

43:40The person that was closer to the emotion understood what it felt like to not fully be in this relationship, to be uncertain to be sat on the couch and not have anything to talk about to always be going to bed worried about whether or not who's making the right decision and the version of him now isn't more experienced they're further from the evidence and i was like fuck i love like i love the fading affect bias i've got this story from a friend sent him this like series of texts and i was like trust that the previous version of you was stewarding the future version of you appropriately like do you trust that you had your best interest in mind that's a great at the time yeah and i've been fucking fighting with this idea for ages and yesterday is my writing day or sunday's writing day so i'm sitting down and i've got fucking a thousand and it only needs to be 500 words it needs to be short little essay snappy that basically what i've just said a little bit more formed and i've got a thousand two thousand words of just like bullshit and i'm like i can throw this into ChatGPT, put it on deep research, and it'll take my words and it'll put them together, put them into a flow.

44:46Maybe it'll tell me a story about Charles Darwin and it'll be done. And I knew that if I did that, I would get the essay out today. It didn't shock horror for the people that subscribe to the newsletter. It didn't go out today. I put something else up that was easier for me to write. The reason that I didn't do it was that that idea will be concretized for the rest of time. That will be the reference that I use for whatever the name is I come up with it, or the story, the way that it's formed, the examples I use, and they stick in my mind. And I'll always know that it wasn't me that did it. I'll always know that it wasn't me that put the fucking finishing garnish on the dish.

45:18I did all of the hard work and there was this bit at the end. And I wonder whether, that might be ego. I think it probably could be ego. But I also think it's like this, it's this, you see where the world is going a little bit with it. I mean, you can't even open your phone without it just begging to be like, well, let me do it for you. You can't even like, someone will email you and I haven't even read it. Do you want me to respond to it on your behalf? Yeah, I had to turn it off on my phone. It was like summarizing my messages and I'm like, what? I'm just going to read it. Like, hey, I got an email reply.

45:48How about this reply? And it's this whole reply. And I think we're in a state, at least I am. I am, it's like this yearning to be like, it's so great to work your mind. You have to try to work your mind because dude, I feel like there's days that go by when I'm on tour, I'm on autopilot. I'm not, I'm, I'm not doing anything beneficial. I get tired. I'm just on my phone. I'm doing scrolling. And like, I'm like, I'm getting dumber by the day. Like I just, like, I'm not getting cognitively fast. Yeah. And I'm, I'm not, yeah. I'm not, uh, exercising my mind. Like I'm not, I'm not trying to make it this big thing where I'm like, you know, God, exercise my, whatever.

46:25But yeah, I think I just yearn for having this having that stamp and like it's it's such an accomplishment like growing up as a kid like that's why so many people are against participation trophies right like i'm in there myself it's like against it i'm just there's not a better feeling than when you do get it earn the win earn earn the win instead of being like we're all winners it's like no you wrote a bad song it's bad but i promise in two years when you write that song and you know you did it and you crushed it and you put it online and people resonate with it and you think that they're just resonated with it because it's a different no it's because you failed and failed and failed you made the right song and that is like that's the whole i don't know i feel like that's almost just the point of everything like it's it's it's the payoff like if you just write ai the rest of your life like there's there's i don't know there's no there's no like highs and lows in that you're just very yeah i don't know does that make sense like it's there's a line from mark manson that I've been fucking obsessed with this year and it speaks to this AI thing.

47:30Do hard shit, not because it's fun, but because the win actually means something. You bled for it, you broke for it, you earned it. Easy wins are forgettable, hard ones change you. That's the point. That's everything. And the more that I think about that line, easy wins are forgettable, hard ones change you, that's the point. I'm like, oh, that's the choice that everybody's going to make when it comes to AI. And it's going to be in small ways as well. I've got to write a letter a thank you letter to somebody saying I really appreciate you taking care of the kids this weekend or the dog walker on her birthday or whatever like do people care about receiving a card or do they care about the fact that you went to the effort of having to write it by hand it's one of the strange things about I don't know whether you guys have got Moon Pig or Magpie they're like card sending services but you sort of type in what you want and it's very nice to receive a card.

48:27Like it's kind of rare to receive a card. Yeah, yeah, yeah, very. It's at least twice as nice when it's been written by hand. Oh, because - As opposed to something that's got printed off on the internet, somebody typed it in and it got shipped to your door. It's like, no, go to the fucking post office. Because yeah, it's not like I receive a letter in the mail and I'm like, this 2.99 piece of paper is what I've been looking for. No, it's like, okay, they put an - Like they're just showing you love from afar because they can't. They're showing you ever from afar. So yeah, it's like - And again, I'm not saying that like AI doesn't have its place in certain parts of the world.

48:58Like obviously, I mean, it's just technological advance. Like for example, I don't, I don't go hand wash my clothes and hang them up on the clothesline. Yeah, we're not churning around the bus. I'm like, yeah, I'm like, I got to live hard, you know? Cause like obviously we advance, but there comes a line where it's like, all right. Yeah, I can, I can, especially, I think where I, the line crosses for me is when it's like artistic or sentimental, right? Or I'm sure there's other stuff, but artistic, it's like the whole point of art is that it's not perfect and it feels like something only humans can do, right?

49:32So it feels very natural. And then with the sentimental stuff, that's the whole point of, like you said, writing a letter. I'm not writing you a letter just so you can have the piece of paper. I'm writing you a letter and putting something in here that I think is going to have an emotional effect on you, just like I'm having an emotional effect writing it. And I'm doing it, and I'm not saying that writing a letter is hard, but I don't know. I think we're saying the same thing. It's harder than putting the prompt into ChatGPT and getting it to do it. It's better than just checking the box. This episode is brought to you by Whoop.

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51:08And it's weird because do hard things is kind of this tagline that everybody likes to lean into. 4.30 a.m. cold plunge and the runs and the weightlifting and you stick into your diet. But the decision of do I want to do the harder thing or the easier thing is going to encroach into every area of life. It's going to encroach into whether or not you want to order. If you one click order flowers that goes to your missus's door because she's having a hard day, or if you drive to the fucking florist and pick them up and hand deliver them to her, There is just a, there is a explicit real world difference, a tangible difference between those two things.

51:46But as things, convenience begins to encroach on the rest of life, everybody's going to have to make that decision for more and more and more stuff. Oh yeah. Like, yeah, you're just saying it's, it's not, I saw this one picture where it was like, it started as sit down restaurant. It turned into drive-thru and now it's Uber Eats. you know it was movies and then it's youtube and now it's youtube shorts like it just it just keeps going yeah and it just keeps expanding derivative it becomes distilled down yeah and it's like even i mean i find myself i used to never do this but i found myself literally this week and i of i was watching instagram reel and i was i was watching it and i was like let me hold down let me go times two speed here you know and i'm like what am i doing like i just i need to I need to speed fuck myself with this algorithm harder.

52:35And it's like you're saying, it's not just that. That might not be the bad thing. I don't know, maybe you're on a bathroom break and you're like, I don't know, get to the point. You know, I get that. But it starts creeping into everything. Because yeah, 20 years down the road, you know, with a musician and they're like, oh, I got to pay the bills. We need a new song. I just don't have it in me. Write a song. It's pretty good. It's going to sell. Like what's stopping people from doing that if it's just every year, it's just one extra thing, you know? Well, you know, think about how songs are recorded now.

53:09You go into a studio, you can play a song like pluck by pluck and just chop that together. And then you got the perfect take, the perfect take. Whereas it would have been, what, 50 years ago, a single fucking room? Yeah, because they were also on tape. So they, I mean, they legitimately had to make a decision right there in the moment and say hey either we'll run out of tape or hey it's literally not worth our time to go they had like exacto knives they would have to cut these things together splice it physically tape it up run it through the machine like it it's and now it's just yeah just hit it again you're fine yeah so that's why you hear on so many of these old records like an Elton John record or something like that you'll hear like in the background some like a hat fell on the keys but it was a great take and they're like we can't keep the hat in keep it like you'll hear like the little key hit like you know and they just keep it in there and it kind of gives records life a little bit like there's there's certain things like i think in in the records that i make i think like my i think the imperfections almost make it perfect sometimes and it's just you know as soon as you say imperfections give something a degree of life the imperfections then begin to be engineered.

54:25Everything becomes marketable, right? The authenticity, the stripped backness. Well, oh, this great story about Elton John, we must have a hat. Has anyone got a hat in the room? We can make the hat fall at the right time. It's very, so, okay. And look, whoever's listening to this, I don't know if any Nashville producers listen to this. I'm probably not talking about you. I've had a lot of great experiences in the whole national thing yeah but there are a lot of that a lot in that setting that it's very performative like you said it's very uh it's like they want it to be natural so bad that they're gonna make it natural does that make sense like you said like it's going to be engineered artificially natural like you're saying artificially and it's like what's the craziest thing get your car keys and you know that's how they did it you know and that that's how they did it on whatever it's called and no we need to be living in the and i'm like i think it's it's just this sort of commodification of everything and as if it's less gatekept by technology or by expertise it means that more people are going to be tempted to do it the problem is going to be can we remove drudgery from people's lives without taking away the stuff that actually matters to them without taking away not just like you want to be involved in this thing but it is genuinely better for you to take a longer route round to take a higher friction route from where you are to the outcome of this thing because it's going to be better for you maybe the work will be worse yeah but the win will mean something it won't be as forgettable uh you know yeah it's strange i guess it's it's weird in music because for such a long time there's been teams of writers and you know bands even it's like okay so you said the lyric and maybe the fucking guy that wrote the lyrics left it's like a 10 year old song yeah right and the guy maybe he's dead yeah you know he's oh well he's not even a part of the band anymore but we're still singing it and it's ours we get to own it so it's there's been more fluidity but that also i think means it could be a slippery slope oh yeah mastering what do you fucking you must be able to one-click master track not as well as a elite audio engineer now i'm guessing but you must be able to one-click master tracks now with for sure i mean and again like some of it is good so i want to say like i want to be it's important i say that some of it is good because there's also a lot less gatekeepers nowadays in music it is so sick that i can write a song called like coal that i believe in and i record it on my laptop i put it out and it does better than 99 of all the money pushed multi-song songwriter songs i love it that's awesome i love it that's that's great i think that's a great side of like entry access yes yes um but like you said democratized it so that you can compete exactly but you're right like it it's a slippery because as soon as people go that works hold on and it's like hold on we're the millionaires where's gossip ai how do i make yeah dude but it's like that works it's only a matter of time that that's the thing maybe that's what i'm trying to get i'm not trying to sound like bleak like everything that's good it's all yeah it'll be commodified eventually yeah but it kind of feels like that like in in the industry there are thousands of people working every single day to find the next new thing yeah so when you have something like pull or something like i don't know anyone else in this industry that has a song people are going to be like what did they do why did it work how can we replicate it yep and how do we just dump a truckload of money behind it and just make it happen did you see that uh was it a variety piece about geese you know that band yeah yeah i didn't see i didn't see the piece it was like a big article about how the engine the clipping engine and stuff was behind that band i think the band were pretty successful beforehand and then it's just you know you really put the fucking fuel nitrous booster button on between where was this song originated who wrote the lyrics because is it an AI song?

58:32If AI helped you to craft the lyrics and then you sang them? I think so. But my point is like, at what point, how far back do you go? Okay, so I'm really struggling with Rhymer's Block. It's an app for iPhone. I'm really struggling with a word that rhymes with small, but fits this. Oh, I'll just go in. It's like, at what point, where do you draw the line? That's a great question. And as technology begins to democratize it, the only place that you have this, that you can make this decision is my own kind of moral gauge for what I want on the other side of it. Yeah, I think I do. I mean, there's a great area, but I think it's one of those things where it's like, you know, you know what I'm saying?

59:12It's one of those, like, I feel like - The ick radar. Yeah. And it's, I mean, I even, it's, I'm not trying to get like too deep, but I think this goes with a lot of things. I think there are people that are just going to always push the envelope of be like, well, what am I allowed to do? Like always trying to be like, how much wrong can I do before I get in trouble? And I try not to look at it that way. I try to be like - Because you don't immoralize it. Yeah. And I also just, I just like, I don't have, I don't think I have that thing in me where I'm like, how much can I squeeze out of this with AI to help me write this song without people thinking that it's AI.

59:56And it's like, I think if you're doing that, like, you know what you're doing. But I think if you're, if you're, if you're a kid at home and you're trying to like, you wrote this song and you're like, dang, what's that word? Open up the dictionary, open up like a rhyming website or something. And you find like, oh, cool. That kid has no intention of being like, you know, oh. This fucking word was written by AI. Yeah, like that's his song. You know, I, because he's, I don't think that that, that someone like that's pushing the awful, like, like, I don't know. I don't know how to word this correctly, but I just think, I think you know.

1:00:31You know, like if, or do, I mean, like there's also the debate about, you know, producers and mixers and engineers and stuff. Like you said, like, what if they use AI to kind of like help them with the EQ? The side chain's really hard, yeah. Yeah, and it's like, yeah, okay. I, you know, as long as the meat and potatoes. Hey, there's an argument to be made that as soon as you've got doors and you're like, hey, back in the day, dude, we asked to take a fucking lead, take it out of that synth, put it into that. So you want to chain those things together, go and get your quarter jack. Yeah, it's like, is losing an electric piano, you know?

1:01:06So yeah, again, I think it comes down to like, you just know in your gut, like you're either making music or something else is making the music for you. And it's like, I don't know. It seems like you take a very sort of emotionally informed approach to music. It's quite self-deprecating. stock sometimes i think is that fair yeah uh i think i think it kind of depends like and i also think it really changes the mood of the song itself like uh i don't know i find those songs can be easier to write i feel like when i write my happy songs they come off cheesier when i when i feel like it's the same level of lyrical writing um dude and it's also yeah it also if I put if I put Cole on like an EDM track I guarantee people would be like they wouldn't really care about what the lyrics are it doesn't feel sad it's like have you seen people that play ballad piano like the Drake and Josh theme song and it sounds like a beautifully written song and you're like it's kind of deep it's kind of a sad whatever but it's like it's all how it's framed I think I mean I think of like Jason Isbell when it comes to this but if you put his type of lyricism into his type of guitar playing and his voice in the raspiness, like it's going to come off that way, whether it's intentioned to be or not.

1:02:27Or then you can go listen to like a Turnpike song, who I think is some of the best writers in the world, but maybe they're four on the floor and it's kind of a more upbeat groove, but he's talking about how like my dad's going to whoop my ass if I'm ever back in this county. Like it might be a sad feeling, whatever it is. I'm not trying to say that song specifically, but, and it feels upbeat. You're like, oh, I can get down to this party. You know, it's a good time. So I think - Forget the lyrics or remember. Yeah, I think it's, yeah, I think it's sometimes the way that it's played on the guitar.

1:02:56You're playing different like minor chords and stuff like that. But I like to lean into that. Like, I feel like I love listening to music like that. Even when I'm like happy, I'll be the happiest guy in the world. And I'm like, let me put on a sad one. Let me put on a slow one. Why do you think male sadness is dominating modern country? i think i think two things uh i think for one um i think it's the only place where i feel like a lot of guys a lot of males um feel like they're allowed to talk about it like without being without like for example if i went up to like my buddies or in our group chat and said how i felt in coal it would come off of like like brother get it together what are you talking about but you put country music behind it and it's like dang that's a beautiful song I actually connect with that but I'm not gonna like say I do you know it feels like it's guys uh almost like a dude therapy session and I think that's why so many people write about it is that it connects really deeply it almost like it says the feelings that a lot of these dudes I think feel but they're like blue collar fellas around they're like I'm not telling I'm not telling nobody how I feel but like you do when at our shows the the people who are like heart and soul singing it out there in the crowd are the are the dudes arms around each other that i promised they would leave that show and they would never tell each other about their feelings but they come to the show and they're looking at each other screaming these lyrics and it's like yeah it's like cathartic it's like it's their it's like a thing so i think i don't know i think it just comes off well it's like the way to way to do it as a dude without still being cool i wonder if it's a weird comment on masculinity that men feel comfortable seeing their emotions reflected in lyrics but uncomfortable exposing them in daily life like this guy has said this thing that i feel he's put words so i'm happy to sing it yeah i'm happy i'm happy to sing it that his show yeah and i'm still it feels like there is room for that it's a it's a really interesting sort of balance between those two things yeah and it almost it almost feels like sometimes the opposite for women like it almost feels like female songs are empowering and male songs are about vulnerability yeah but but and it's and it's the opposite too where it's like when women sing about vulnerability it's almost like the male crowd is like here we go another you know another female country is talking about a breakup but it's like when guys do it it's like brother you know i got so it is it kind of feels like that's that's the male outlet sometimes it's like through music and then i feel like the girl outlet again i'm i'm not trying to be the guy speaking on behalf of all the women out there i would never do that but um yeah it kind of feels like it's the opposite where it's you know i thought i don't know maybe i'm wrong i thought uh i sit in parks by kelsey ballerini was such a fascinating fucking concept for a song i haven't heard that oh dude so it's her talking about um a relationship that she used to be in and she didn't go through with it because her partner wanted to have kids and she wanted to focus on her career.

1:06:01And then a few years later, she's sitting in the park on a weekend looking at this family playing with the kid and she's asking, have I made a mistake? Have I made a choice that I can't reverse? So I take my Lexapro and I puff on my vape and the album's due in March and my next tour is coming up and my friend's about to have a kid and I'm worried I miss this thing. And that was really fucking raw, like very, very complex. I guess, yeah, maybe I might have missed the mark because also Pinhouse by Kelsey Balleruny, like that's also a great song. And it's like kind of about a relationship. So yeah, maybe I'm wrong, but - I think that you're right.

1:06:43I think that especially a lot of the country music tropes, maybe that's the reason. Maybe that's one of the reasons why. That if you hear a guy talking about vulnerability, it feels rarer. yeah and it's now being done through this vehicle which is music and it's uh almost like the tortured hero the only way that he can even open his heart is to do it to a chord yeah you know it's like that's the excuse that's being given but it's also a defense mechanism it's a defense mechanism because if guys aren't comfortable about talking about it normally this frames it in an artistic and romantic way that just creates a little bit of distance i don't actually need to show myself in the same way as you said yourself and it's accepted open up in the in the group chat it's different to what's going to happen if i open up in a song what the kind of thing that blows my mind is how many guys would love to have that outlet but aren't singer song writers and how difficult it is to find something else because i think yeah writing songs maybe poetry but that's perhaps even more inaccessible than than some singer songwriting essaying, micro blogging stuff on Substack and you can write in the third person.

1:07:58And that feels, that's probably a little bit more accessible, but fuck me beyond that. It's like, you're into the world of YouTube and conversations with a therapist. So it's, I don't know. It's a, I guess like that, that might be like the dudes that come to those shows, you know, that's like, it's group therapy. It's like, man, I can't sing it, but I'm going to, I'm going to try it and not, you know, or get in the car or do it or, yeah, drink and then talk to the buddies. Like, you know. If you're going to spend an hour in the gym, you might as well look hot and feel comfortable while you're doing it.

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1:09:37like happy i think and not not in a way it's like oh man i can't write about being happy because I can, but I feel like it doesn't come off the tongue as easy as like, as like a sadder, more heartfelt song. I feel like I can really paint that picture versus like when I'm singing a song and maybe like, I mean like happy. I don't mean like love. I feel like I can write really well about love. I feel like I can write about my wife, like a lot. I have, I've written a ton of songs about her and I feel like those are some of my favorites I've ever written um but i'm talking about just straight up this one's gonna come in come come on in the bar yeah i struggle with that um i don't know why i think some people nail it and i've just i i can't it's not always there i mean i spoke to dan and she about this luke combs fucking unbelievable like got as much swagger as it's possible for a white guy to have yeah like he's the blackest white guy yeah yeah and um but when you think about the that sort of arc over the last what decade or so of his of his songwriting you go from very sort of tortured uncertain tumultuous crises and now there's a bit of me that wants him to smoke some crack there's a bit of me that wants him to like have that friction again in life because things are going well and my son misses me when i go away but i do come back and like my dad's getting older and that's going to be hard when it doesn't happen and he's still fucking ripping it yeah but how much harder you have to work to make a banging song when you don't have that friction in your life yeah i mean you're almost beginning to concoct stories or you're hearing things that happen to other people or you know confabulating ideas and and tales of an imagined world a different world that you could have lived in yeah right this is what i could have been it's like your life's so good that you have to imagine one you don't have in order to be able to create because for some reason people seem to resonate a lot with that pain and that vulnerability and again if art is imitating life and your life's going really fucking well what are you going to be singing yeah what's what yeah what's what's your sad song show me your pain yeah and again i don't think it's the worst thing in the world too when people like because i also love being a storyteller i love writing songs about i have a song called lone old cowboy which is about you know a guy going and getting cheated on killing the guy and on the run and i'm like i never did that but i think i love the storytelling aspect and that comes from i think kind of more like that western kind of swing old music like marty robbins like about like the gunfighter ballad and everything there's like a whole album of just like ballads written about like gunfighters and stuff it's like fables yeah yeah mythology yeah but then but then there also gets to like Like, yeah, you start getting into what feels like it could be a real story.

1:12:34Like, obviously, no one thinks that I went and shot this guy and ran away. But, you know, when I sing a song about maybe a stranger that I see, that I'm like, I'm just going to make up what I think his life is like and tell that story. I think that's also sick. I think that's really cool. Do you know where Jolene came from, the Dolly Parton song? I don't know. Maybe. I don't think so. I'm pretty sure it's written about a bank teller, bank assistant that flirted with her husband. That's cool. And she didn't use the name of the bank teller, but found a lady at a party who had the name Jolene and placed the name of the lady.

1:13:16The story came from a beautiful bank teller who flirted with Dolly's husband, Carl Dean, shortly after they got married. Dolly said the woman was tall redhead and paid Carl love attention. Carl enjoyed the attention. Dolly joked that he seemed to spend an awful lot of time at the bank for someone with so little money became the seed for the song it was more of a playful thing the name Jolene came from a totally different person an eight-year-old red-headed fan who asked Dolly for an autograph she thought Jolene was such a beautiful name that she told the girl she was going to use she wrote Jolene and I will always love you that's not right she didn't write I will always love you it was working nine to five um she didn't write I will always love you did she yeah did she yeah that was that's her song that's her song and then whitney houston sang it on what was what was the movie and then and then i think dolly was i think dolly publicly said like that's your song now like it's no that was yeah that's that's that's dolly song jolene and i will always love you in the same day talk about crazy yeah fuck you with your fucking 25 minute yeah yeah yeah get on her yeah she's like let me just write some of the two two absolute bangers but yeah um again you've concocted this story you've taken you know one element from the other oh and then i guess it was in so linda ronstadt sang it every song that ever she sings is just better um that's so cool whitney's record became the best one of the best selling singles of all time 14 consecutive weeks at number one pretty sure that uh this has just been knocked off the top by uh ella really yeah uh because it's Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey who both had the 14 and I'm pretty sure that 15 is now Ella yeah it's crazy fucking wild good for that's that's so sick I wonder whether there's any emotions that you want to sing about but you don't think that the market has an appetite for I mean okay here's a great example and I know a lot of artists struggle with this I'll play an acoustic song on my back porch and I'll play it a certain way but I know the studio is different studio version is different it's got some drums has a little you know slide maybe in it it's just kind of more upbeat and then you'll put out that version and everyone's like just just don't change give me the porch give me the poor you know and it's like i think you have to try to expand your sound like i was watching that billy joel documentary so cool by the way if you haven't seen it it's like five hours long it's incredible his life is just it's what the heck but he always made it a point to change the way his sound was bob dylan did the same thing where you went to the Newport Folk Festival and everyone was like you know get your harmonica out he's like I want to play an electric guitar and it's it's uh you feel like you don't want to get trapped in like your own trope like I'm not trying to get trapped in this like I'm an acoustic guy I'm going to sing about how hard my life is and but you also want to service the people who listen to your music the most like you know that's what they want that's and it's like yeah it's this it's it's like this push and pull thing so i feel like i feel like i've done the best job that i can like i don't really put too much pressure on i'm still making music that i love i really not i don't try to overthink it um but yeah i know a lot of artists that fall into that thing where it's like i want to put out different music but i just know it's probably not going to do well and if i do it if i put out this song i probably do a lot better because that's what i'm known for that's what people want to hear you know the idea of audience capture Have you heard of that?

1:16:34Okay, so it's from my world's content creation, YouTube. You test the ground with a bunch of different content. Maybe you start to pick up a little bit of speed. And then you find something that hooks a bit. You start talking about politics, but you talk about it from a libertarian lens. And you're maybe a bit more bombastic than you used to be. Oh, wow, they like that. Oh, well, I've been rewarded for that. I'll go again. And you get a bit more bombastic. you get a bit more bombastic before you know it you're like peak alex jones yeah you know sort of shouting and screaming and and doing the thing and you begin to throw red meat to your audience and instead of creating what you want to create you give them what you think they want yeah the problem with it is that you can achieve success with it because you're basically taking audience feedback which in some ways is important and good like movies screen test the versions right and they check how what were people's reviews should we change this but this felt a bit slow people don't understand that.

1:17:32So, you know, audience feedback is important, but if you're not careful, especially if you're doing something that's very iterative over time, your audience doesn't fall in love with you. They fall in love with your projection of what you think they want you to be. And you're like this weird reverse puppet thing where the audience has got their hand inside of you doing this and reliably every single person that I've seen do it. And there's a bunch of people that have done it in my world and probably tons in yours as well. Every single person eventually has ended up resenting the audience. Because what happens is you contort yourself into this weird shape that you think the audience has rewarded you for.

1:18:13And then if they don't like what you're doing anymore, you feel so aggrieved because you betrayed yourself for an audience that doesn't even want the act that you're playing. And it is so fucking reliable. So that's one side, that's audience capture. And then Ethan Strauss has got this fucking unbelievable post where he talks about criticism capture, which is the opposite side of it. So audience capture was this big term for a long time. People do what they think the audience wants. It's the musician who denies himself the move from acoustic to electronic or a total pivot in terms of singing style because he doesn't think that the audience is going to want it.

1:18:51That's your audience capture. criticism capture is behaving in a way to avoid criticism or front run it from your audience instead so instead of acting out of encouraging desire it's acting out of defending against hate yeah so what are people going to criticize me for doing most likely and how do i front run that so that it doesn't happen so you see this in the same way in my world um people start to caveat a lot before they say anything well we must remember that this they'll do this sort of land acknowledgement this throat clearing thing beforehand or in a different way people sort of steam out of the gates really aggressively and they're super ardent and militant and they have no quarter given no and that's another way to do it they're sort of pushing people out they're front running the complaint they're either um making themselves so inoffensive that they don't say anything so that they don't get criticized or they kind of shadow box this imaginary opponent who doesn't really exist in an attempt to scare off critics so and you see it's so fucking warping it's just audience dynamics yeah reward and pain and people are playing with these two levers in an attempt to try and get as much pleasure and as little discomfort as possible and it kind of leaves you on eggshells where you're just like ah i don't know what to do yeah and it's dude especially like nowadays with social media everything's so instant that like i think that messes with artists quite a bit of just the most instant feedback you can have you'll you'll walk off a stage uh you know sit in the green room and you're getting tweets or you know or you're getting your stories up and it's yeah it you know in with the phones yeah i used to i don't know but have you seen jerry can you pull up that video i want you to show you that there's two videos going back to back that i think are pretty interesting there's this morgan wallen video that's floating around at the moment which is him in a fucking huge stadium and someone saying uh the performance standard for male versus female artists is so different is all i will say

1:21:17That's closer to a military reenactment. It's so much. So anyway, and then look at this. Pull that other video up, Jared. Is it the Tate McCray one? Yeah. I mean, it is just. An insane level of. It's the most polished. Like, look at this.

1:21:38oh i'm gonna dip myself in literal liquid gold oh my god is it like actual

1:21:52i'm sorry i mean that's like the whole like the coachella like justin beaver the night i'm waiting for you to do oh yeah that's dipped in liquid gold that's in the next set and we're doing that that's the next album well it's just i mean it's different like i've been i've been to a morgan show it also like the production is still crazy him himself might not be he needs a dance number you know what i mean but he needs a dance number i guess like it's also it's also this recency bias thing where people just they just have to keep doing the next big thing and make it bigger which like in entertainment that's a good thing like i I think you should be challenged.

1:22:27But I mean, you go look at the female acts from like, I don't know, 1950 or even the male acts. Like everyone's just on a microphone and just doing the same thing. Like, I don't know. But yeah, I guess when did that separation happen? Because I mean, we used to have like NSYNC, Backstreet Boys, and they were doing full production. Like when did it become? I mean, MGK is bringing it back. He's got full dance numbers on stage. He's got choreography. Yeah. But like everything that's new is now old, you know? Yeah. Oh yeah. It's like, oh, they used to do that. That's cool. Let's bring that back. All right, dude, let round us out.

1:23:00What's your, give us a little something from the new album, whatever you like the sound of. I'll play a song called Clothesline.

1:23:10Should I sing this one? Yeah, this one's good. I think this is going to be a single, maybe. I don't know. That's something you could do this afternoon. No, but I do it on purpose. This is what I'm talking about. Like when I, I, yes, I could choose the singles and have it all on the calendar and rock it and just go. But I, I don't, again, I think this is something that I probably, I struggle with is kind of the system formula thing. I don't know. Like I, I would rather go like week by week or like feel it out. I don't know. Yeah. I don't know. I, I, I, I think it's going to be the single. but again i i also actually this and i will i'll sing it right after this but this brings me back to a point that we were talking about earlier uh about like teasing music and crowdsourcing and being like what song does better like there's a part of me that misses the way of like when an artist puts out an album you don't know what the songs are they've not waterfall released five in advance you don't know what the songs are and you are stoked to dive then yeah and i'm trying to play this middle ground like okay business wise yes we should be teasing songs and you know getting people excited and i'm not saying it's a bad thing but there's a side of me that's like man wouldn't it be great just to give fans just 12 new songs that everyone can be excited for and you have no idea what it sounds like it might be a whole new sound like that's kind of what used to happen or like i don't know like i just think that side of it's cool like my favorite thing i know i brought them up a lot um but turnpike when they dropped price of admission they did no singles all they did was put up a billboard in the middle of the desert and was like albums out in two weeks i think that is so cool now i'm not saying everyone can do that like algorithmically might not be the most exactly effective way to do it but it's sick but yeah and that but that's where like as an artist you have to kind of weigh your options between you know like we said earlier like what's authentic and at the end of the day like what is going to get people this music.

1:25:13Like what's going to pay the bills and do, you know, there's a fine line. Unreal. But anyways, this one's called Clothesline. I haven't played this one in a while. I should, I'll remember it. That's another thing. I'm bad with lyrics.

1:25:31Oh, am I plugged in? Yeah, I am. Cool. This one's called Clothesline.

1:25:41Baking soda on the bed sheets Make me smell brand new I'm sleeping in and I'm going out Trying not to think too much about you Don't call me later when my light's off I know just how you do You call me once, you get my door later And the morning you'll be gone too soon Cause I know you're just gonna hang me out to dry So close to being left on that clothesline Oh, second guessing's always left in this old heart of mine Baby, I know you're just gonna hang me out hang me out to just

1:26:43out to just

1:26:51so stopping early at yellow lights said it ain't worth the risk you used to tell me that I'm moving too fast with your hand tied around my wrist So treat me like it was years ago Before you changed your mind Said I was nothing but a hopeless old lover And baby, maybe you'd be right I know You're just gonna hang me out to dry So close To be left on that clothesline Oh, second guessing's always left in this old heart of mine Baby, I know You're just gonna hang me out, hang me out to jail

1:27:53Out to jail

1:28:00Now I know You're just gonna hang me out to drive So close To be left on that closed line Second guessing's always left It's been so hard of mine Baby, I know You're just gonna hang me out Hang me out So just

1:28:36Yeah, so just

1:28:45Let's fucking go. Dylan Gossett, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you. Dude, you rule. Congratulations. New album's out when? September 25th. Fuck yeah. So Appreciate the heck out of you man Yeah Thanks for having me Alright Goodbye my beauties Dude That was a great time brother Thanks so much for having me So you're not worried about hosting the whole family for the holidays? Why would I be? Wayfair had everything I needed to get the house holiday ready What if Mike brings his cheerful dogs? My tree has tons of five star reviews telling me how sturdy it is But what if everyone's plus one brings a plus one?

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