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Episode 452: lamb of god’s Randy Blythe’s Search for Perspective in ‘Just Beyond the Light'
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If Randy Blythe's first book, Dark Days, was about accountability, his second book, Just Beyond the Light, is about perspective.
In essays ranging from the premature death of a young fan to surfing waves to revering his beloved grandmother, Randy talks about art and music and the messiness of being a creative person.
Visit randyblythe.com to learn more and to see dates for his spoken-word tour in support of his latest book.
Sponsor: The Power of Narrative Conference. Use CNF15 at checkout for a 15% discount.
Newsletter: Rage Against the Algorithm
Show notes: brendanomeara.com
Support: Patreon.com/cnfpod
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Transcript
Introduction & Promotions
00:00:00
Speaker
Hey, CNFers. Frontrunner. The Life of Steve Prefontaine is available for pre-order. Powell's, Bookshop.org, HarperCollins.com, Barnes & Noble.
00:00:13
Speaker
$32.99. Hey, everything helps. Every author you know under the sun begs for the pre-orders. They mean a lot. And you only have so many dollars at your disposal.
00:00:24
Speaker
So I'm just going to say, please consider pre-ordering the front-runner. Promotional support for this podcast is brought to you by the Power of Narrative Conference. Now in its 26th year, final weekend of March, the 28th and 29th, hundreds of journalists from around the world will descend on Boston, Massachusetts,
00:00:42
Speaker
To hear keynote speakers like Susan Orlean, Connie Schultz, Dan Zak, and Connie Chung bring the knowledge. Listeners to this podcast, get 15% off your enrollment fee if you use the CNF15 code at checkout.
00:00:58
Speaker
So go to combeyond.bu.edu and use that CNF15 code. You get some nice burrito money with that. So he hits me back and he says...
00:01:11
Speaker
you know, the most important thing ah to do when we're writing is to engage with the truth. When we sit down at our writing desk and engage with the truth, we make the blank page our bitch.
00:01:33
Speaker
Oh, you see in efforts, the creative non-fiction podcast, the show where I speak to tellers of true tales about the true tales they tell. I'm Brendan O'Mara. Hell yeah. This is an exciting book pitch.
00:01:46
Speaker
So I get anywhere from 20 to 30 book pitches a month. And when I saw that Randy Blythe, the lead singer of the uber heavy metal death metal band Lamb of God, had a new book out, Just Beyond the Light, I leapt at the chance to speak with him.
00:02:03
Speaker
Lamb of God makes Metallica kinda sound like Led Zeppelin, okay? And as a big Metallica fan, they should tell you something. And I saw Lamb of God three times in 2009 when they opened for Metallica. It's been a while since I've seen them.
00:02:16
Speaker
They're intense, and Randy's singing voice is so different than his spoken voice, it's crazy. He has such a warm and engaging presence and a real joy to talk to and about how he went about too writing this book. He's also the author of Dark Days, which is a more traditional memoir and a more three-act structure.
00:02:33
Speaker
Just Beyond the Light is more like ah linked essays and stuff with on everything from death to surfing to... Just a wild swath of stuff. It's a good hang.
00:02:47
Speaker
Show notes of this episode and more at brendanamara.com. There you can hang out and read blog posts, check out past episodes of CNFPod, and sign up for the monthly Rage Against the Algorithm newsletter.
00:02:59
Speaker
There's also patreon.com slash cnfpod if you care to window browse and perhaps share a few bucks with the podcast.
Discussion with Randy Blythe Begins
00:03:06
Speaker
Also, we haven't had any written reviews on Apple Podcasts in several months, and i maybe consider taking a few minutes and leaving a kind review to help the wayward scene ever consider this little podcast that could
00:03:21
Speaker
Well, in this episode, we talk about Randy's sobriety, surfing, songwriting versus book writing, the ugly process of writing to get to the good stuff, and what you can tell about a person by how they stack their woodpile. He's performing a spoken word tour in support of the book, which features live Q&As, and you can learn more about that at randyblythe.com.
00:03:45
Speaker
Great talks, ZNFers. Here is the lead singer of Lamb of God and author... of Just Beyond the Light, Randy Blythe, Riff.
00:04:06
Speaker
My barometer for it is like, is is the writer like a good hang? And it was always just like a good hang to come back to your book. Oh, awesome. that That's a great way of putting it. You know, I think when you're reading a memoir or or personal essays, that that's a wonderful barometer.
00:04:24
Speaker
You know, do I want to hang out with this person or or are they highly annoying, you know, pedantic or whatever? Lately have been... because I'm getting ready to go out on this sort of spoken word book tour where I'm going to be telling a bunch of stories that are not in the book but relate to the book's themes.
00:04:41
Speaker
I've been reading some writing by Marc Maron. um Oh, nice. Yeah, and he's he's a really funny guy, but also one of my all-time favorites, and I was lucky enough to meet him and Rich in a while ago at Fountain Books.
00:04:56
Speaker
was David Sedaris. And you read his stuff and it's so funny and you're just like, I want to hang out with this guy. He's hilarious. you know Yeah. Well, i love that you bring up Marin and Sedaris that's got of a something of a jumping off point
Literary Influences and Inspirations
00:05:11
Speaker
too. is ah you know Very late in the book, you know when you're talking about your writing and your writing process, you say, you know,
00:05:16
Speaker
that writers ah really stand on the the shoulders of those who came before them, those people that inspired you. And just from a writing perspective ah and a reader and a lover of books, who are some of those authors and books that really inspire you?
00:05:32
Speaker
Well, you know, i talk about this fairly often. When I was a young, angst-riddled 20-something man, i read a lot of the sort of typical the typical authors, which, of course, are these supremely masculine authors, like...
00:05:53
Speaker
Hemingway and Bukowski and Hunter S. Thompson and some Burroughs, you know, at least for people in my sort of um disgruntled age group, I suppose, young young dudes.
00:06:07
Speaker
And um I did, i proceeded to do a lot of the things that those authors did. i i drank to excess and I did a respectable amount of womanizing. I even got in a few fistfights. I did everything those writers did except for writing right was i was practicing um so those writers i think are still important to me you know they were they were part of um my early sort of um my my early sort of literary awakening uh but for me and i would like to think that i would be like a manly hemingway writer in
00:06:46
Speaker
very intense with my economy of vocabulary and short, sir terse, masculine sentences. But I'm a bit of a blabbermouth at times. I really have to be edited. So I believe in the primacy of story.
00:07:02
Speaker
And one of the one of the one of the writers from the American South that I've loved reading since I i was a young young young man was Pat Conroy.
00:07:12
Speaker
Because my dad turned me on to him. He he yeah tells, he weaves these incredibly elaborate stories that just suck you in. And um he he's not, his sentences are not short and terse and Hemingway-esque. And although I wanted to be like that, I'm i'm a lot more, I think, like a lot like a bit more elaborate and in my sentences. I really have to watch myself. So I love...
00:07:40
Speaker
I love Conroy's stuff. I also, as a young child, I really enjoyed reading things that were beyond my comprehension level. Like in the fourth grade, um I read James Clabel's Shogun, right?
00:07:57
Speaker
and And that's a little bit long and intense for a fourth grader. And I didn't understand a lot of it. especially a bunch of references to to Japanese culture that um I was unaware of.
00:08:12
Speaker
But it immediately set off this sort of lifelong love affair with Japan. And the first time I went to Japan, I've been wanting to go there since I was in fourth grade. I was just like, this is so cool.
00:08:23
Speaker
i'm I'm here where ah where everything happened. and And the writers I like when I travel, because I'm lucky enough to travel For my band, i go to um I go to a lot of the places that I've read about. Like, for instance, the first time I went to Savannah, Georgia, of course, I'm thinking about Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil and and going to see all these places.
00:08:47
Speaker
The first time I went to Paris and still when I go to Paris, I'm going to all the places on the left bank where Hemingway and Gertrude Stein and all the expatriates of the so-called lost generation hung out in the 20s.
00:09:02
Speaker
that That stuff still inspires me to this day. Whenever I read ah ah book that is set in a specific place, and with Pat Conroy, it's Beaufort, South Carolina.
00:09:13
Speaker
i I have friends there now. I go and visit and see all the places. Whenever I read about ah a certain sort of place in a book that's very place-driven, have this great urge to go and see it for myself, to see if it compares how it compares in real life to the mental picture that I've drawn, which is one of the wonderful things about reading.
00:09:32
Speaker
As opposed to just watching, not that I don't watch movies, but as opposed to just watching a documentary about a place. When you read about a place, you construct it in your mind. And then if you go and see it, it's it's really cool to see how the two pictures line up.
00:09:46
Speaker
Big the Tolkien fan as a young man. um Read The Lord of the Rings, big Hemingway fan, of course, and that's carried on. And as of late, I'm reading, what did what did I just finish reading? just finished reading actually one ah one of Marin's first books.
00:10:04
Speaker
But i don't have a specific favorite type of genre or anything. i just read whatever strikes my my fancy. Yeah, and speaking of like reading above comprehension, I remember when I was in eighth grade, I was 14. I read Catch-22 by Joseph Heller.
00:10:20
Speaker
Yeah, and it's like, ah you know, when you read it on a superficial level, it's just it's so wacky and and funny. But, you know, it is so subversive. And I haven't read it in a long time, but it's like it's just one of those books that ah it's kind of a gift that keeps on giving him and Vonnegut.
00:10:38
Speaker
I love that kind of witty, it subversive way of how they went about their their novel writing. Vonnegut, he did even Cowgirls Get the Blues. Is that right?
00:10:48
Speaker
Oh, is that is that might be Tom Robbins. Say it with confidence, B.O. It was Tom Robbins, and he just passed away. One of those great, quirky, amazing, thoughtful writers who who takes you there, man.
00:11:06
Speaker
takes you there. No, yeah it's interesting reading Catch-22 at that age. I read 1984 in the year 1984 when I was 13 and I was like, oh my God, is this the future?
00:11:22
Speaker
And it is like right now. And we're here. We are here we are here Have you read Barbarian Days? excuse me i barbarian days yeah Yes. In fact, I have. I read Barbarian Days and I'm a surfer. I'm internalizing that i think um in in a little slightly different way than non-surfers do.
00:11:46
Speaker
yeah because i'm I'm thinking about these places. and there's ah there's There's a fairly good body of em surf literature out there. Some kind of wacky writing. There was a guy from Montauk originally, Montauk, Long Island, the end of Long Island, which is a great longboard wave named Alan Weisbecker.
00:12:08
Speaker
And he wrote a book called In Search of Captain Zero, which is about his ah sort of surf adventures in Mexico and South America and all that stuff.
00:12:20
Speaker
um Very interesting dude. he passed away a little while ago. But why do you ask about Barbarian Days? Oh, just from the the surfing element of yeah your latest book, i was I was thinking like, all right, if you ah hadn't read it, I would be like, you should definitely pick that up and read it because you have such a connection to surfing now.
00:12:39
Speaker
And I figure since you did read it, you probably did it did probably did really resonate with you in a way, ah now but the way Finnegan writes about it and the globetrotting aspect of it too. Yeah, the it's very interesting, you know, the the history of surfing. He certainly writes about that. There's a lot of ah darker history around surfing as well, at least in the early days. Some of the biggest surf brands that are in existence today, a couple of them were...
00:13:09
Speaker
founded by these globe trotting early sort of surf pioneers who were going to southeast asia in places but they were also smuggling drugs out right that's is a viable way to to make a living back then as ah as a globe trotting surf searcher and they would hollow out surfboards and put stuff in there one of the guys who's in this famous documentary the endless summer did that he He wrote a book called Transcendental Memoirs of a Surf Rebel.
00:13:38
Speaker
um Pretty interesting. ah What i love about ah hearing you talk about the surfing or reading about it in the book and also just ah how you immerse yourself in ah in art, be it songwriting or or writing, and how you have to just kind of muscle your way through it in um and sit with it.
00:13:57
Speaker
And I think surfing is a really good metaphor in a sense because... You can think about catching a wave all you want, but you can only catch it if you're in the water. And sometimes it'll come and sometimes it won't. And sometimes you're going to fall and sometimes you will catch catch it. And you've got to just surrender to that flow.
00:14:15
Speaker
And I wonder if maybe you can kind of expand on that idea because that is so integral, I think, to ah the way you surf, but also the way you create.
Creativity and the Artistic Process
00:14:24
Speaker
right well i think um the number one thing is is that i came to surfing late in life i guess i was around i don't know 43 i'm 53 now and i was writing my first book and i had rented this place down in cape fear north carolina a place called oak island and i found this killer little beach house it was 650 a month a block and a half off the ocean just wonderful
00:14:52
Speaker
And I was writing and I was like walking. one day I was walking on the beach and I saw some people surfing and I was like, I'm going to learn how to do that. And I thought it would be relatively easy for me because I'm a lifelong skateboarder since I was a young child.
00:15:07
Speaker
And the sort of physical language of surfing is the same as skateboarding. So I thought, wow. Well, it'll be no big deal. I'll just get in the water and sort of skateboard on the water.
00:15:19
Speaker
How hard can it be? turns out extremely hard, extremely hard. um And it is a ah ah sort of fully immersive experience because the environment in which you're surfing is not static. It's constantly changing. There there are no guarantees. Unlike if you're skateboarding, you're in a park and you see a park bench and you approach it the same way. It's a static object and you can practice again and again and again until you get it correctly. In surfing, everything is protean. It's constantly changing. So you can't
00:15:56
Speaker
plan but so far ahead. And I think um you just have to do. And I think with with writing, for me, it's much the same. i can have an idea of what's going to happen when I sit down to write.
00:16:10
Speaker
I can think I'm going to write this story about how I did the nonfiction podcast today. i and and I'm going to write about how awesome it was. But oftentimes, if i'm if I'm being an honest writer, it will go a different way.
00:16:26
Speaker
I have to remain open to that. The best writing advice I ever got was from my friend Kevin Powers. And he wrote, ah he's a National Book Award finalist. He wrote a book called The Yellow Birds, which was made into a movie. He's ah an Iraq War vet. He was a machine gunner over there, had some pretty rough experiences. And he he wrote this novel about it.
00:16:49
Speaker
So when I was writing my first book, I was very nervous i and I sent him the only real writer I knew some of the pages to see him. Am I on the the right track in asking for advice, validation as it were, because the artist.
00:17:06
Speaker
So he hits me back and he says, you know the most important thing ah to do when we're writing is to engage with the truth when we sit down at our writing desk and engage with the truth we make the blank page our bitch you are definitely engaging with something true keep at it So and how that relates to what I'm saying is, is that much like surfing, I can have a preconceived notion of exactly how something is going to happen when I sit down to write.
00:17:43
Speaker
But if I'm engaging with the truth, if i mean if I'm being open and and really being honest, it it may take a different path. And I and i have to accept that. I can't get upset that I did not write this work.
00:17:57
Speaker
wonderfully witty essay on the the creative nonfiction podcast. And instead it turned out into about how I'm annoyed at the neighbors for their dog tearing up my yard or whatever. Does that make any sense?
00:18:10
Speaker
Oh, for sure. i love the idea of, you know, like you said, you can have that this idea in your head, but of all ah ultimately you do have to just kind of surrender ah to the conditions of that day and some days you just need to be comfortable with writing but writing shit and yes through writing shit eventually you do that often enough good stuff has no choice but to surface eventually yeah 100 percent um i think that's sort of a misconception that people have about
00:18:43
Speaker
art in general, um they when they when they see the finished product, when they when they see a beautiful painting or they they read a wonderful book or they see a band, you know, I'm i'm used to this. They see a band and and everything is beautiful.
00:19:01
Speaker
just great the band is tight the song is awesome it it doesn't just pop into existence as a fully formed product it's a process man it's a process of getting rid of a lot of crap a whole lot of crap you got to go through a whole lot of bad ideas before the one good thing comes up yeah I'm a photographer as well.
00:19:25
Speaker
And people I exhibit, people like this is beautiful. you know How did you do that? I'm like, I took a whole bunch of really bad pictures first. Really bad pictures.
00:19:36
Speaker
and i think that sort of And think that's one of the the problems and in modern day life, especially with social media and so forth, is people put forth this perfectly curated version of their lives or what they've made. And and you don't see ah all the other boring crap. You don't see the process. You don't see the long fruitless hours where you're tearing your eyes out. You know you don't see the boredom.
00:20:01
Speaker
the frustration and the and the disappointment which exists for all of us it really does no one sits down and is like i'm a genius this is going to be great bling out pops the pulitzer prize winning novel ah yeah exactly and i love with um let's say when like metallica is putting out a new album they often film themselves and through like through the songwriting process and they'll put those videos up and you'll see you'll hear like the iterations of certain songs before their final, and you're like, yeah you know when they're on the final record, you're like, oh, that's that's great.
00:20:35
Speaker
But when you hear them workshopping it, be it how James enunciates certain words or plays with certain lyrics, like, oh, that doesn't sound quite right because it's not the final product, but they're workshopping it. And it's great to see even masters of their craft laboring through things and I always use that I lean on that as kind of a metaphor to show like even people who are super skilled they're doing crappy stuff to get to the good stuff and it's just you really that is part of it you have to be patient and sit with it and think about it and iterate and just keep going in the face of in the face of that
00:21:13
Speaker
Absolutely. It's the same for me. Speaking of music, it's the same with me with writing lyrics. yeah So pretty much for for every album my band, Lamb God, puts out, um the all the lyrics that I write, they're generally in one notebook. I try to keep it to one notebook per album. um And sometimes I go over...
00:21:34
Speaker
But you when you look at the lyrics for a song that I've written and you're like, those are killer, killer lyrics. If you could see the notebook, you would be like, oh my God, this guy's an idiot because there is, you know, 30 pages front and back of sentence after sentence, me writing down this idea and then changing it, crossing out and then rewriting it below it and then changing it and crossing out. And this just goes pages and pages. And you can see,
00:22:03
Speaker
you know, out of three pages, I've gotten two lines and I'm constructing the song that way. It's not like I just sit down and the muse whispers into my ear, oh complete song.
00:22:15
Speaker
it's It's just scratching, constantly scratching. Sometimes it does come very quickly. and And those are those wonderful days. um Those are those, know,
00:22:27
Speaker
you know, television, and television movie about the artistic process days where the person just sits down. It's like, okay, blam, I'm done. You know, that's, that's, um, I love those days when it just flows effortlessly, but most of the time it's a struggle.
00:22:45
Speaker
Yeah, you're right. Those are the sitting by the fireplace tweed sweater wearing made for TV versions of the writing life. Yeah, exactly. It's, you know, you look like you're in Masterpiece Theater on PBS or whatever. and No, my new book. look tick yeah No, no, no, no, no. For me, it's just, you know, my, oh God, when I'm deep in writing, I have to remember to take a shower. i like i get unshaven. My hair looks crazy. I'm just like, ah. Yeah.
00:23:10
Speaker
It's falling to pieces. and it It doesn't look pretty. Right. I love, a you know, you write kind of in that similar passage that I just cited. yeah Most days I approach writing with a sense of overall overwhelming dread and anxiety. And I think a lot of people, I know I can relate to that. And I know a lot of people who are listening to the show can certainly relate to that. And so.
00:23:31
Speaker
Someone like someone like yourself who has a book under your belt ah two books now and like thousands of lyrics and you know dozens and dozens and dozens of songs It's just like it's still every time you approach it is it's kind of like the same set of neuroses every single time Right.
00:23:47
Speaker
Well, I think that's important. i I actually talked to a friend of mine who who writes for psychology today. He's a psychiatrist. And we were talking about this neurosis to to approaching our work, any our work. And i think it's a sign of ah ah ah healthy relationship with your work. I mean, you can't be paralyzed totally to the point where it's like, oh my God, i'll never I'll never be anything good. I can't do this. But you have to question yourself, I think, because once you but become convinced of your own genius, I think, then you've lost touch.
00:24:28
Speaker
with the reality of this situation and you're just going to churn out uninspired stuff um it's like a a band that makes the same record the same exact record again and again and again and again fans some fans will love it but don't you want a little growth um so and you have to be willing to take chances and So far, I've just, I've never been 100% competent in any artistic pursuit of mine. Like, I'm going to kill this.
00:24:56
Speaker
yeah okay When I start off, no way. it's You have to go through this process. You have to just keep going through it and chiseling away and trying to find the gems.
00:25:10
Speaker
I love a moment in the book where you're ah writing, someone might have been positing to you, like, ah you know, I'm thinking about starting a band. What advice can you give me that will help me be successful in the music industry? And you're like, no, no, no, stop. Wrong question.
00:25:24
Speaker
A musician needs to make music. And I kind of love that that ethos that I think some people, maybe they want to be the music the musician spotlighted on a big stage in an arena, um but they don't want to grind with the work. They want to be ah a writer, capital W, without doing the writing.
00:25:42
Speaker
And that that passage really really struck me as ah emblematic, I think, of a lot of... ah a lot of what happens with aspiring artists. Right. Well, well, that was me with writing, um, back in the day because i actually did a little bit of writing.
00:25:59
Speaker
I did some creative writing in my late teens, early twenties. Um, I even published a few issues of a fanzine self published and I wrote some, they were kind of rough hewn, but they were fairly amusing stories about my life.
00:26:15
Speaker
regrettably, alcohol became more important than, than writing. And I drank myself into a nice case of alcoholism, but I could almost justify that with looking at these sort of mythic, hard drinking, literary heroes, you know, Hemingway, of course, Hunter S Thompson, Bukowski, Hunter S Thompson and Hemingway destroyed their talent and wound up shooting themselves. And,
00:26:43
Speaker
Bukowski just kind of drank to the bitter end So I bought into that that sort of cultural mythos of the hard drinking writer. And I talked about being a writer. I'm a writer, you know, but I wasn't.
00:26:56
Speaker
i was i was a fraud because I wasn't writing. You know, I wanted to be the writer, but i I was more interested in drinking than actually doing the writing.
00:27:08
Speaker
Yeah, there's a moment or early in the book, too, where you write, it seems utterly ludicrous that I allowed the consumption of a cheap fermented liquid package in a can readily available at any corner store to divine my existence.
00:27:20
Speaker
But that was indeed the case. How could I not see what I was doing to myself? My perspective was all fucked up. And how did you reorient your your perspective ah when you made that realization?
00:27:31
Speaker
Well, man, you know, i I tried my best to ignore the fact that I could not drink like a normal human being for 22 years. And ah not just drinking, I supplemented it with dry goods, a lot of those as well. um But i i did not want to accept the fact that when I drank, different things happened than happened to other people.
00:28:01
Speaker
Most people, when they go out and and drink, even to excess, you know everybody does it from time to time. They go out, have too much. They wake up the next day with a hangover and they're like, oh God, never again, you know, yeah until until the next a National Amateur Hour Day, which is, you know, New Year's Eve, Cinco de Mayo, St. Paddy's Day, when everybody decides that they can drink, you know.
00:28:28
Speaker
and then they pay the price the next day, and and then they they don't drink for a while. They're normal people. For me, drinking too much and winding up you know getting arrested for being drunk in public or getting in a fight or winding up in the hospital or winding up in the mental ward, um that didn't stop me because I had it proceeded to blame everybody else for my problems, so I would drink at that.
00:28:55
Speaker
And finally, what happened, i was on tour with Metallica. Speaking of them, we were in Australia. I woke up one day on a hotel balcony and I was just like, I don't want to exist anymore.
00:29:06
Speaker
I had, just, I didn't feel suicidal. I just wanted to vanish from existence, you know? And I was in a good place opening up for one of the biggest bands in the world.
00:29:18
Speaker
So I was like, I really have to to try something different. I have to try and and and put this stuff down. And and i did, you know, and and that was over 14 years ago. So when that happened, you know, there's a big fear. That's one of the questions that people ask themselves, particularly artists of any stripe, whether you be yeah A musician or a visual artist or a writer or whatever.
00:29:45
Speaker
If you have a problem with drugs and alcohol, if you're depending on that, you tend to lie to yourself and say, my creativity, my creativity is dependent on this. This helps me do this. Right.
00:29:57
Speaker
And I certainly bought into that great lie myself, that sort of cultural mythos of the fucked up artist. But I found when I got sober, it actually removed this sort of soggy, wet blanket that was smashed on top of my creativity, you know? And the ideas just started flowing.
00:30:21
Speaker
It became a problem. In fact, it's still a problem to
Sobriety and Creativity
00:30:24
Speaker
this day. i now have... my main problem with creativity is, is not ideas. It's trying to decide which ideas to pursue. Cause I have way too many, way too many.
00:30:37
Speaker
My brain just started firing. I want to do this. I want to do this. I want to do this. I want to do this. You know, I'm just one person. I can't do everything. Yeah. So ah i have to learn to focus and concentrate on the task at hand, one thing at a time.
00:30:55
Speaker
That's been the biggest difficulty as far as creativity with getting sober. If anybody out there is listening to this and you think your creativity is dependent on whatever drug or alcohol your favorite drink is, it's bullshit. You know, it's bullshit. It's a little rough going in the beginning when you when you get sober, but it is in no way, shape or form dependent upon a substance and substances in fact, eventually only dull your creativity.
00:31:22
Speaker
Right. And I think a lot of people deal with, ah you know especially if they're sober, curtailing drinking significantly, is that you'll you're viewed as kind of an unfun, stick-in-the-mud wet blanket.
00:31:34
Speaker
if you don't Because the it's such a ah ah socially acceptable social lubricant that if you're not doing it, you're some sort of a teetotaler wet blanket. And that there's like this so societal pressure to kowtow to that.
00:31:49
Speaker
Yeah, man. I think that sort of paradigm is changing. yeah Things are really different from when I grew up. and I mean, I look at a lot of things through the eyes of a musician, you know, of a music fan.
00:32:04
Speaker
um And when I was young, the bands that I listened to, most of whom I'm friends with now, a lot of them were raging, raging partiers.
00:32:16
Speaker
So it it was it was like, of course you're going to get completely drunk and and destroy things. you know Of course you're going to get strung out on drugs. You're you're a rock and roller. That's what we do.
00:32:28
Speaker
I think now um it's becoming not cool to be a sloppy mess, which I think is it's kind of neat. I really do. I see that sort of shift in the culture in young people, and I think that's a wonderful thing.
00:32:44
Speaker
But as far as like it, there is societal pressure. I think it is such ah a socially acceptable, acceptable thing. And it is a social lubricant for me.
00:32:56
Speaker
I've just, except for at the beginning, um, when people particularly fans of my band were like, cause we used to drink with our fans all the time. They'd be like, have a drink with me. And I'm like, no. And they're like, oh, come on, dude. And I'm like, no, no, no, no Everything's going okay right now. Right. You seem like a nice guy.
00:33:13
Speaker
You know, I'm not being rude. No one's crying. No one, nothing's broken. No one's hair is on fire. All that could change if I take a drink. So let's just, let's just stay with the not drinking right now.
00:33:26
Speaker
And people eventually got it. I do not have a problem being in social situations where there's alcohol at all. It doesn't tempt me. If it just disintegrates into just sloppy. I love you, man. I just leave.
00:33:41
Speaker
you know And they won't remember it anyway because he'll be drunk. know Yeah. Yeah. I like that there's a ah moment in the book, too, where you you just said, I just had to keep my side of the street clean, control myself and try not to be so goddamn judgmental.
00:33:56
Speaker
And after all, hadn't I publicly made an ass of myself on many occasions? So I try to do whenever I can. I really do. And I think that's really i think that's a ah really good sort of headspace to be in, you know, with respect to that, for sure. Well, it's a it's it's very important for me to remember where I come from and and how I was when I was drinking. Because as soon as I forget that stuff and I think, oh, I got everything under control. I'm this awesome sober dude and I never screw up.
00:34:28
Speaker
Yeah. It's only just a hop, skip, and a jump from there for me to be convinced that I am not responsible for my own actions. I don't have to, you know, oh, I can cut myself some slack.
00:34:43
Speaker
And that will just grow and grow and grow until eventually I'll i'll i'll be like, you know, I'm just going to have a drink. um just So I have to stay very cognizant of of what i was and i don't i don't sit here and kick my own ass constantly like you are a horrible drunk you know that that's pointless and also it's just the other side of the the egomaniac coin right i was not the adolf hitler of alcoholism i was just a ah drunk You know, and if I sit there and constantly berate myself, that gets in the way of me being an effective human being.
00:35:19
Speaker
And it certainly gets in the way of me being able to accomplish anything with what meager creative gifts I do have. If I'm just sitting there berating myself, it's narcissistic, narcissistic behavior.
00:35:31
Speaker
So I try not to, to focus too much on, um, Like, or at least not just like flagellate myself over the past, but I don't forget it. and never forget it.
00:35:43
Speaker
i need to stay right sized. Yeah, and oh yeah talking about the mythos around thing, you you were talking about the hard-drinking lifestyles of various writers, be it a Hemingway, Bukowski, you could throw Fitzgerald into that too. Oh, 100%. Yeah, and and then in rock and roll too, it's so baked in ah to that culture. So to to find sobriety, I mean, you found the allies you needed you know from roadies and stuff who have walked that path before, but i imagine it's it's difficult, uh, in the subculture, under which, you know, you make a living. It's, I imagine that there was very hard to take those first steps.
00:36:22
Speaker
It, it can be, you know, in fact, like I said, I got sober when I was in Australia and I hadn't, you know, I was giving it a go. i hadn't drank in a couple of days and I met this fan,
00:36:36
Speaker
in the city center, i think in Adelaide, i think we were there and he was following Metallica around or whatever. And I was sitting there having a coffee and he walked up and he's like, Oh, Randy, nice to meet you, mate.
00:36:48
Speaker
How you doing? I'm like, i looked at him and I'm just like, you want the truth? He's like, yeah. And I'm like, I'm not doing so well, man. haven't had a drink in a couple of days and I'm trying really hard not to drink, you know, and it's kind of rough. And he's, he's like, I haven't had a drink in 10 years.
00:37:09
Speaker
So I'm like, he sits down with me and he's like, how's it going? And I'm like, man, it's, it's pretty rough. And I'm thinking, you know, I haven't had a drink in a couple of days, but it's It's tough out here because everybody's partying. So maybe I'll just, I'll wait until I get home. You know, maybe I'll just get through this tour and, and, and, and drink through the end of this tour and I'll clean up when I get home.
00:37:35
Speaker
And he, he looks at me, he goes, he goes mate you might not make it home and i was like you're right you're right dude because i did not drink like a normal person you know i and was not drinking in any high class establishments out of wine glasses or whatever i'm just throwing everything i can get down my throat and and whatever else drugs came my way and that stuff kills you.
00:38:03
Speaker
So he, he's like, you might not make it home, mate. And I'm like, you're right, dude. And, I remembered that. And in retrospect, I think it was important for me to get sober out on the road because it showed me that I could do it anywhere.
00:38:21
Speaker
it you know It what wasn't easy, but I'm grateful for it. I really am because, um, you know, I had these wonderful dreams of going home and going to some rehab, probably some fancy place and like passages in Malibu or whatever the commercials are, where they have yoga and horseback riding and, and all that stuff, you know, and you can ease into it in this beautiful coastal environment. That's not, that's not what was presented to me.
00:38:48
Speaker
Um, what was presented to me is like, You have to stop and get yourself together right here,
Support for Sobriety on Tour
00:38:54
Speaker
right now, or you may not make it home. And, um, I'm just grateful for that because, you know, my, first my whole first month of sobriety was spent on tour. Um, and I was able to do it.
00:39:05
Speaker
And, you know, if I can do it out there, I figure I can do it anywhere. If I can get sober on heavy metal tours surrounded by free alcohol and drugs, I can make it through anything. Oh, for sure. did it Was it one of those deals where you found when you were ready for that support that it kind of it rose to meet you?
00:39:21
Speaker
Absolutely. Absolutely. You know, the old saying, when the pupil is ready, that the the teacher will appear. And if you're open to that, and we're talking about societal pressures to drink and all this other stuff.
00:39:35
Speaker
If you, you'll find out, man, if you or have a substance abuse problem, if you're an alcoholic or a drug addict and, and you stop there, there are a lot of us out here, you know, and they will appear and you don't even have to look for them. it It was just kind of wonderful experience. You just have to stay open to it.
00:39:56
Speaker
Yeah, there's a moment in the in the book where you talk about ah just a great thing that your piece of advice your father shared with you where you can tell a lot about a man by the way he stacks his woodpile.
00:40:06
Speaker
Yes, sir. Yeah, and I really love that as an ethos because you can really apply that and overlay it over just about anything. And I imagine like you know as you turned a new leaf and 14 years sober, like that is a ah ah way of stacking your woodpile in the way and in a way of showing up in the world.
00:40:25
Speaker
Yeah, 100%. The passage you're referring to, you know, I wrote this chapter, I believe that's in the chapter, it's in the chapter about my grandmother, because she grew up um during the depression without electricity and running water and all that stuff. um And I learned a lot from her as a child, but even when I was a child, I experienced a little bit of that kind of lifestyle. Something, certainly nothing is as severe as her, but like we heated our house with a wood stove and my dad, we used to moan and groan
00:40:56
Speaker
and about, oh, I don't want to chop wood and stack the wood today. And he's like, do you like heat? too Get busy. you know, because that's how we heated the house. And he wouldn't let us just stack the wood in a sloppy, haphazard manner. There's a specific way to do it so it'll dry and season and you will be prepared you have to do an advance too you don't just start stacking wood in in november when it's cold you do it way in advance in the spring you chop it split it stack it that way it's going to season and you have to lay it you have to lay it neatly and so that there's air space and you don't want it out and um exposed to the to the rain or whatever it'll just be soggy it's precise
00:41:41
Speaker
And so if we were screwing up, you know, my dad would always say, son, you can tell a lot about ah about a man by the way he stacks his wood pile. And he was right. i didn't I didn't realize at the time he was just, he was telling me more.
00:41:56
Speaker
ah He was telling me something greater than just how to to keep the wood stacked properly to heat the house. He was telling, giving me life advice. And so um as crazy as my life was, as haphazard as it was for a long time with no real plan, somehow I i managed to to make it through and remain alive. I don't exactly know how.
00:42:20
Speaker
um But now that... I've taken a lot of the chaos out of my life. I'm really trying to order it and a in a manner that is conducive for me to do the things that I need to do and be the most effective human being that I can.
00:42:37
Speaker
Yeah, that anecdote with your father reminded me of a bunch of years ago when I read the Steve Jobs, Walter is is Isaacson's Steve Jobs biography. And there was a and moment early in that book where ah Steve Jobs' father um was painting like the other side of a fence that you would not normally see.
00:42:56
Speaker
and you know and Steve was was asking him, why like, why are you doing that? He's like, well... even though other people can't see it, like I know that the the other side would not be painted. we mean We want to have like elegant, basically elegant design inside and out, even if people aren't going to see it.
00:43:12
Speaker
And ah that goes to some sort of ah an internal North compass to know that you're doing a thorough job and not just doing something for appearances. Right. Absolutely. I used to work in this restaurant in Richmond, Virginia. i was a cook.
00:43:25
Speaker
and a roofer at the same time as was in the band for the first like eight or nine years or of our career. So i was working as a cook in this restaurant. There was a married couple who owned it.
00:43:38
Speaker
And the man, that the the husband died. And ah we went to the funeral and his wife said something pretty profound. He he had gotten cancer and and he knew he was sick.
00:43:54
Speaker
He was going to die and she was talking to him about, you know, what's going to happen in the future once he's gone. And, and he's like, I want you to be happy. i want you to find someone else to have a partner in your life, to be fulfilled, to be ah ah complete human being because they weren't you know in their 80s or anything these were relatively young in the middle age couple he goes but i will say this if you meet another man and you and you do fall in love and you want to to marry him never ever get involved with a man
00:44:29
Speaker
who if painting a doorway does not take it off its hinges to paint it because otherwise he's half-assing it and sloppy and you may not see underneath the door you may not see right around the hinges or whatever but a man who takes a door off to to paint it completely he's going to do a good job at most things in life and i thought that was pretty profound advice overlaying that over ah art or creativity is so much of the work is unseen and it's not performative. If you're doing it right, it's not performative. like
00:45:04
Speaker
yeah Not the final product, of course, when you're up on stage. that There's the performance element there, but so much of it is the anonymous time we spend alone at our computers or but in front of a notebook.
00:45:15
Speaker
And it though that it's the summation of all those anonymous minutes that turn into the thing that people grow to admire from us.
Preparing for the Spoken Word Tour
00:45:23
Speaker
Oh, yes. And, you know, right now, i'm and my book comes out February 18th. And to support it, I'm going to go out and do a spoken word tour, as I said, where going get out and tell stories on stage and that relate to the themes of the book.
00:45:40
Speaker
And right now i am... It's a week away and I'm practicing, practicing, practicing, and I am constantly rewriting these stories and looking for economy of vocabulary, where to cut a word here, where to cut a word there. And when I get on stage, I think it's going to look pretty cool. I think it's going to seem off the cuff. I think it's going to sound very natural.
00:46:02
Speaker
Some of it will be, but there is a lot of work going into this right now. A lot of it. the Even just tiny little things, like one word here, one word there. i am hacking away, hacking away.
00:46:15
Speaker
the The book, it covers such a a ah kind of a wonderfully wide swath of experience. you know you know Obviously, it starts out with a you know um this this man, Wayne, who grew it was a fan of yours, who grew to be a dear friend, who you know eventually you know dies of cancer. And then you talk about you know organ donors and being being a match and you talk about your grandmother and your father and writing creativity and sobriety. like There's a lot linked things that ah ah so so maybe on their surface, as I say that out loud, that don't seem very connected, but there is a what there is a through line through which you're able to braid all this stuff. and
00:46:54
Speaker
I imagine that was yeah Perhaps a ah challenge for you to to stick them together and and you do master masterfully, but I wonder, ah you know, how did you? ah String them together in a way that made sense When I see my first book it was much more traditional narrative a classic three-act structure Which was provided by some rather unfortunate events in my life. The book is called dark days if anybody wants to check it out it's But it it it was a really sort of straightforward memoir. I already knew the beginning, the ending, and it really fit the classic three-act story structure.
00:47:32
Speaker
With this book, I only, my my i had an idea that the theme of my first book was personal accountability, right?
00:47:44
Speaker
And the theme of my second book, I wanted to be perspective. I wanted to to, I think a lot of my problems are a problem of perspective. Right.
00:47:55
Speaker
So I wanted to write in an honest way how I struggle to put things in my life in a proper perspective and what to attach importance to and what not to.
00:48:10
Speaker
So I only knew at the beginning that i that ah there were two things I wanted to write about. A, I wanted to write about death. Because of the the first chapter, I knew I wanted to write this chapter called The Duke about this fan who died of leukemia, Wayne Ford.
00:48:26
Speaker
And I knew I wanted to write about surfing. Because this experience with this young man, and really it broadened my perspective. He died at a young age, but he handled his mortality just with such grace, ah passing away at 33 years of age.
00:48:41
Speaker
So it was very inspiring to me to see such a young man handle this with but such dignity. um Because I don't know what's going to happen when I die. i I'm hoping...
00:48:52
Speaker
That I will say something, there'll be a great last word. You know, my, my inflated ego wants me to say something profound and, and then pass away peacefully or whatever. i don't know if that's going to happen or not.
00:49:06
Speaker
I could totally panic like, Oh my God, I don't want to die. but But I do know that it's possible to die with dignity because i watched this young man go through the process and do it. So it had a very profound impact on me.
00:49:20
Speaker
So I knew I wanted to write about death through him because that's really the ultimate fear of every single human being on earth. I think ultimately it's our mortality. We have to come to terms with it.
00:49:30
Speaker
And I also knew I wanted to write about surfing because that has changed my perspective for the better as well. So death and surfing, there are these these two things, and but that's all I knew I wanted to write about.
00:49:43
Speaker
So in changing, in keeping to the theme of perspective, um I started with this fear of death. and i wrote about the this young man, Wayne Ford. And then that made me think about fear itself. And and most of my problems and perspective, I think, come from my ungrounded fears and and catastrophizing of reality in which any little minute thing I screw up, I can immediately...
00:50:15
Speaker
draw an entirely logical sequence of events from me forgetting to pick up yogurt for my girlfriend at the grocery store and ending in thermo global nuclear holocaust you know it happens in seconds boom boom boom this this crazy catastrophizing thing so that made me want to write about fear and then i you know i wrote ah about some instances of fear um in in that in the next chapter. And and the idea once again, we' were talking about staying open to the process. I did not have a, like I said, just death and surfing is all I knew I wanted to write about. I did not have like this perfect outline. I did not have the three act structure in front of me. i did not know anything other than the beginning really, but I stayed open to the process and the ideas came to me.
00:51:06
Speaker
slowly and i just want to make sure though as i'm writing that everything i write ultimately serve the main theme of the book which i would like to think came across as as the struggle for ah proper perspective And towards the end, you write, for better or worse, this book is written by me, solely me. It's not an algorithmically assembled composite of the sum of millions of other writers' work. It's a result of my hard work, my process.
00:51:31
Speaker
And whether it's a good book or the worst one ever written, this book stands on the shoulders of giants. All those writers who came before me, who completely gave themselves to their work, at work that gave me comfort.
00:51:42
Speaker
And I, you know, I love that sentiment. And i just given that you've have a, you know a huge body of work, a ton of writing, but this is a different kind of writing than you've historically done in the, in in the past. And I wonder what, like, maybe what did you discover about yourself in writing your books that maybe you hadn't in ah through songwriting or how it's different?
00:52:05
Speaker
Right. I think it, It is very different. I think certainly for me, writing a book is a... It makes writing a song look like going to kindergarten comparatively. It is a much harder ah slog. It is a... You have to have endurance.
00:52:26
Speaker
I think that's the main thing. You have to have endurance because it is a sustained creative exertion that has to eventually make sense over many, many, many pages. Whereas no matter how long it takes you to write ah a set of lyrics for a song, the idea is expressed on a single page.
00:52:48
Speaker
you If you got 15 pages of lyrics for one song, you got a problem. so So it's ah it's a different approach. I think for me, but just like with with singing or or or any sort of artistic ah pursuit I'm engaged in I'm trying to write above my talent.
00:53:12
Speaker
I'm writing to write beyond my skill level. I'm trying to write... beyond my level of intelligence i'm a man of average intelligence but i'm i am trying to write beyond that right something that is useful something enjoyable for people and it doesn't just happen bling you know it's the process and and i think i'm trying to remember that um yeah I have to to to remain in the process and remain open so that um you know i can maybe write beyond my intelligence level and skill level. And I've heard other authors talk about this before.
00:53:57
Speaker
I've heard they say, you know I write beyond my own intelligence level. So it's, it's different um from, from writing lyrics, I suppose, in that it's much more intense. It's much more intense of trying to, trying to be ah smarter and better than I really am, I suppose.
00:54:18
Speaker
Yeah. Well, it's like what you were saying when you were a fourth grader and you're reading beyond your comprehension at that point. So like the seeds of stretching the ah the frontiers of your interiority go back to when you were just a kid.
00:54:31
Speaker
Right. i you I mean, I don't. It's one thing that's frustrating for me when people are doing something artistically in there and I'm not saying that anything will ever be perfect, right?
00:54:43
Speaker
Because perfection is the death of good. Because if you're shooting for perfection constantly, constantly, constantly, you're never going to stop, right? But it does frustrate me when people make mediocre attempts and say, that's good enough.
00:55:00
Speaker
you know Is it? Is it? Or can you do better? Do not aspire to mediocrity. um and And it's not egotistical and highfalutin and self-important to want to do something great artistically. It's not.
00:55:15
Speaker
It's something that everyone should strive for who engages in the artistic process, I think. I don't want to sit down and and write good enough. I want to write great. ah Whether or not I ever get there, that's...
00:55:28
Speaker
pretty much beyond my control, but I am responsible for the effort, not the outcome. Well, that's really well put, Randy. yeah And I want to be mindful of your time. And as I ah love to bring these conversations down for a landing, I love asking the guests ah for a recommendation for the listeners of some kind. That can just be anything that you're excited about and bringing you joy that just want to share with the listeners. So <unk> I'd extend that to you, Randy.
00:55:52
Speaker
You mean as far as books or a book, it could be a brand of coffee or a brand of socks, you know, just anything you're like, oh this is kind of a cool thing I came across and I'd like to share that. Well, if you, if you like um coffee, which is that you bring that up, I'm good. I got to give a shout out to Richmond, Virginia's very own Blanchard's coffee roaster.
00:56:15
Speaker
And their midnight oil blend is my favorite. It is how I start my day every single day with a pour over. It's wonderful. You can order it online. Look up Blanchard's Coffee from Richmond, Virginia.
00:56:29
Speaker
ah Fantastic. Well, ah Randy, this was so great to yeah get to talk to you about the this wonderful book you've written and i just how you go about the work. So just ah thank you for the time and thank you for everything you do. Thank you, man. i I hope I made some sense. I never do during these things. I never know whether i'm what I said made any sense or not. I hope I made sense.
00:56:52
Speaker
Yes. Awesome. Hey, thanks, CNFers. Thanks to Randy for playing ball, coming on the show, and for writing a kick-ass book. The name of the book, again, is Just Beyond the Light. You can visit randyblythe.com to see if he'll be coming to a city near you.
00:57:07
Speaker
No parting shot this week, but I'll come back strong next week. Pinky swear. So stay wild, CNFers, and if you can do, interview. ya.