Sturgill shits the bed.

Or channels his inner Ryan Adams. Six of one, half a dozen of the other, amirite?

[with High Top Mountain], I definitely felt like there wasn’t really much interest in who I was really wanting to be. So, we made a Waylon Jennings record, and I’ve been trying to shake that shit off ever since. I can’t fucking listen to it. It’s so slick and clean….

I can’t listen to that record. It was a commercial record disguised as a traditional album, and to my ears, it’s just too fucking safe. So, with Metamodern, we got real unsafe….I mean, to my eyes, the Traveller record Cobb did with Stapleton was a commercial country record disguised as a traditional record.

I would say the term “tortured genius” comes to mind, but that may well be giving Sturgill way too much credit. I like the dude’s music; High Top Mountain and Metamodern Sounds in Country Music were a couple of the best albums of the 2010s. And it’s fine if he doesn’t like them, can’t listen to them, whatever. But the whole tone he projects here left me wondering, “if this is how you feel, dude, why the hell did you even bother after A Sailor’s Guide to Earth at the latest?” In fact, with his comments on High Top Mountain and how he felt like there wasn’t much interest in what he wanted to do, why did he even go through with it? It sounds like he’d have been a lot happier if he had, I don’t know, found a record label who was actually interested in what he wanted to do. More to the point, it sounds like he was just going along to get along. Which is fine, I guess, but don’t bitch about the result. Put another way, it sounds like he made High Top Mountain for commercial appeal at the behest of the label. Which is also fine, but he doesn’t have any business casting aspersions on Chris Stapleton or anyone else for doing the same.

Also, if Sturgill’s done, if this is the way he’s gonna be, then, well, whatever. So be it. There are a shit-ton of other artists & bands out there (not just country) deserving of our finite funds who are making great music, like what they do, and don’t feel the need to throw foul, faux-edgy, pretentious temper tantrums and shit all over the folks who helped them get where they are whenever someone sits down to interview them. Marketing stunt or not, it’s still just really off-putting.

(h/t Saving Country Music)

Get on outta here with that, dude.

If you’re a musical artist, and you want to use your platform to spread a political message, that’s your business. But belittling other artists who choose not to do that is a bit of an asshole move, if I may be so frank.

This observation was brought to you by a lyric from Jason Isbell’s new single, “Be Afraid”:

“And if your words add up to nothing then you’re making a choice to sing a cover when you need a battle cry”

Like, piss off, dude. Not everyone who picks up the mike wants to be the next Pete Seeger or whoever, and that’s their goddamned right. As I said a little more than three years ago:

“Seriously, this “all politics all the time” in every single thing is going to destroy us. You kinda should expect political commentary from Steve Earle or maybe (to a lesser extent) Jason Boland, but why should a George Strait or Randy Rogers be condemned for not going on anti-Donald Trump tirades in studio or on stage, or, fuck, anywhere else for that matter? It is grossly unfair to them as artists and to their fans, and as Americans they don’t deserve to be called out for bigotry they’ve never expressed by Progressive assholes who are all pissy about everyone not falling in line with their agenda.”

Sabra made the observation that you see a lot of folks smoke at AA meetings because former addicts tend to swap out addictions, and that Isbell just swapped alcohol for activism. That sounds about right to me, honestly.

Why I won’t be voting for Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders

These thoughts brought to you by Sabra telling me about someone walking in our neighborhood trying to get out the vote for Warren on Saturday…

#RaisetheWage, huh? More like #ScrewPeopleWhoBotheredtoLearnMarketableSkills, if you ask me.

I’m just gonna come out and say it: the real moral outrage here is Ilhan Omar and her thieving ilk agitating for the de facto devaluing of the skills that so many people, like me, worked to acquire so they could work their way up from that minimum wage part-time job.

Not sure I ever came right out and talked about this, but here you go.

I came to San Antonio 10 years ago this coming June. I was unable to find work in the field I was in at the time, so I took what I could get, which at the time was — and this is no shit — part-time work at Walmart for minimum wage. We scraped along by the skin of our teeth for about 16 months until I was able to find full-time employment (albeit in a different, entirely new field). I got that job, got more experience in that new line of work, and moved along to better-paying jobs in that field, and while I am not going to discuss my actual wage, I do feel comfortable saying that I am making more money now than I ever have in my working life.

And Ilhan Omar, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, and others, with that $15 minimum wage, want to take that away from me. They want to take that away from me to buy the votes of people who couldn’t be arsed to want to do better for themselves. If past performance is an indicator of future results, if I asked Elizabeth Warren if I was gonna get a raise commensurate with her minimum wage increase so as not to devalue the skills and experience I have acquired, she’d brush me off and laugh at me just like she did that man who asked if he was gonna get the money back that he spent on his daughter’s schooling when Warren was touting her student loan debt forgiveness plan on the campaign trail recently.

And it pisses me off. It pisses me off to the point that I could almost spit fire.