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Guest: Musician and Survivor Matt Fleming
7 Plays7 months ago
Despite being beset by technical problems, Matt Fleming discusses his journey through alcoholism and anxiety--and how he came out a musician on the other side. Also, why AI isn't taking over music like art and lit. We talk about rich people in ways that could totally get us sued, and I explain why the third President's Son book is taking a Song-of-Ice-and-Fire amount of time to finish. Plus, a song by Matt!
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Transcript
Introduction to The Mentally Oddcast
00:00:02
Speaker
You are listening to The Mentally Oddcast, brought to you by sometimes hilarious horror magazine. Each week, your host, Wednesdayly Friday, will be talking with creators from many disciplines who live with mental illness, addiction, neurodivergence, and the impact of trauma. We'll discuss how their mental, physical, and emotional health impacts their creative goals, processes, and the things that they create.
00:00:30
Speaker
We hope we can assure all of you who live with these things that you are not alone and you can make art about it. Art helps.
00:00:44
Speaker
This week, we have a special treat.
Meet Matt Fleming
00:00:48
Speaker
This is my good friend Matt Fleming. He's a writer, he's a musician, and he's a guy who lives with bipolar disorder, and he is sober from booze. Almost, I guess, four and a half years now? Wow, damn. Matt finished rehab right before the pandemic, so I cannot wait to hear that story.
00:01:09
Speaker
And actually, right now, Matt Fleming is working on his first solo album under the name Astro Manic Fantasy. He's a poet, and he's got a dog. And I'm sure we'll talk about that later too. Hello, Matt. Thank you so much for being here. Hi, Wes. It's great to talk to you. It's been a while. It's been a while since we actually talked with our human voices. It's been a while. So you know what?
Matt's Battle with Alcoholism
00:01:37
Speaker
Let's get right into it.
00:01:39
Speaker
You are a dual diagnosis patient who is living that sober life. Tell us how you got there. Oh, boy. Well, let me tell you what. It sure was crazy. To be honest, on both parents' side of the family, there is alcoholism. I've got uncles and grandparents that just overconsumed, and it wasn't a thing to stop for them.
00:02:10
Speaker
So I try not to lay all the blame on that, but I was a bartender for the last five or six years before I got sick. That's really what happened. I had a seizure, passed out. I woke up in an ambulance. They took me to an urgent care where I'm not really sure what they did because I was in and out in the same evening.
00:02:39
Speaker
So it must not have been so severe. But then I came home and the first thing I did is I went and I got to the bottle, a bottle of booze and I took a shot of booze and my partner, Alex, um,
00:02:58
Speaker
She chided me rightfully like, what are you doing? We just got back from the hospital. I can't believe this. And I was just like, ah, I didn't realize that. I thought this was just like, I just had a one time issue, but I laid back on the drinking. I stopped for a little bit. I started having more frequent
00:03:21
Speaker
issues of having tremors, having withdrawal symptoms. So you're talking about a physical addiction to alcohol, where if you go without it for hours at a time, you've experienced physical withdrawal. Yeah, I had a full on physical dependency. And it got so bad that every night my ex and I would be sitting on the couch watching television and, you know, diddling on our phones.
00:03:52
Speaker
And I would just be sitting there trying to figure out how to get through withdrawal of my own because I didn't want to get real help. I didn't want to admit that I had this gigantic problem that was making me sick. At the time, did you recognize the relationship between being bipolar and self-medicating with alcohol? No, because I was undiagnosed. Oh.
00:04:22
Speaker
Yes, I avoided getting help for my mental health. I mean, until I was, until I got sick. I knew that I had issues since I was in middle school probably, but there was always this, this pall over my head that made me
00:04:46
Speaker
It scared me to try and ask for help, to admit that I wasn't perfect, to admit that anything was wrong, to like my family, to say that to them, or to try to reach out for help. And so in my early twenties, I started just partying, and then that turned into becoming a barfly. By 2019, I was really, really feeling it. I was really scared. I was buying bottles of booze and hiding them.
00:05:15
Speaker
to convince my partner that I was not drinking that much, that I was just having a couple beers here. You know, I was, oh, just a little bit. And by, you know, a certain time of night, I'm getting drowsy when she would say something like, are you okay? Like, you seem a little weird off. I was like, oh, I must have smoked too much weed.
00:05:37
Speaker
It's not that I've been secretly drinking. I was going to work at a bar during the day. My boss was like, hey man, are you okay? Are you on something? Have you been drinking? And I was like, I took some medicine this morning and it's making me weird. And it was immediately clear that that was not the case. I was sent home and I was fired. Oh no.
00:06:04
Speaker
That's really unfortunate that they let you go rather than, I mean, it sounds like it was pretty clear that you needed help. Yes. It's a shame that they weren't
Rehab and Diagnosis
00:06:14
Speaker
more, uh, more proactive in that. No, it was much more of a like cover your ass situation to make sure that they weren't going to get hit with anything. You know, it was, they cared more about the business than they did about me.
00:06:28
Speaker
Aww, they weren't a family? So many employers tell you they're a family and they aren't. We were supposed to be a family. That was why I was there still. But I lost my job. I spent a few weeks trying to get something else, trying to figure out what I was going to do, but being physically dependent and it was coming up on
00:06:53
Speaker
My partner's birthday. It was on her birthday. We were getting ready to go to brunch. While I was in the shower, she went and did some investigating and found a bottle of booze hidden in my laundry in my closet. Oh, no. Yes.
00:07:14
Speaker
she yelled at me and we had a conversation about how I was going to cut back and we were all everything all of this we went out to brunch you know I had a beverage we had some people over that night I was like I am not going to drink that much so I just had a few beers didn't touch the liquor I was like I'm going to be fine woke up the next day and
00:07:41
Speaker
within a half hour waking up, I was feeling the trembles. And at one point I just told her, hey, I think I'm moving into withdrawal right now. I don't know what to do, but I'm really freaking out and I think it's gonna get bad. It became clear that I had to go to the emergency room. So I grabbed my comfort
00:08:08
Speaker
pile my blanket and my little stuffed animals and got in the car and I sat there and shook and Got to the emergency room sat in a wheelchair for a while I was super freaked out because they took my security blanket and my stuffed animals Yeah, they'll do that. Yeah And so then I had six days in detox. So I was 11 11 days total the day I got out of the hospital we
00:08:35
Speaker
went to her mom's house, stayed the night, and then the three of us drove to Tennessee the next day to drop me off at Journey Purin by the River rehab facility in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. Shout out. Oh, OK. And at that point, you still had not been diagnosed with bipolar. You were still thinking that this was strictly an alcohol problem.
00:09:01
Speaker
Well, there was that, and in the hospital, they kind of quickly diagnosed me with anxiety. Yeah, I've been an anxious person since I was 12. I think it might be more than that, but by the time I got down there, I was taking a bunch of meds for everything. We were actually very, very lucky while I was in the hospital after I finally was like, yes, okay.
00:09:27
Speaker
I will go to rehab. I spent a month in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. The main reason that when the choices were given to me, I chose that was because my paternal side of the family is all from Kentucky, Tennessee area. So it had a very home-like feel while being far enough away from my actual life. Okay. Yeah, that makes sense.
Family and Genetics of Addiction
00:09:55
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And so I, yeah, I had finally had a therapist to talk to while I was in rehab. I met a lot of wild people. Yeah. What I didn't think about with going to a treatment facility in the middle South is that I was in a territory where there weren't as many alcoholics in my
00:10:26
Speaker
in my program, as there were people with serious problems with meth and heroin and fentanyl. Well, and in a rehab, if you are there, like I went to
00:10:39
Speaker
Holly Gardens for a while. I was there for two weeks, right when I met H, so like 25 years ago. And one of the things that I experienced was there was me and I was there, I didn't, I was there technically for marijuana, but it was because I had legal troubles that I blamed on marijuana.
00:11:02
Speaker
But if you're in a rehab and you're there, there was a lady there because she couldn't stop smoking cigarettes. So if you're there for cigarettes or booze or weed and you know, a lot of the other addicts that are there for, you know, cocaine and heroin and meth and pain pills and stuff like that, they can be pretty judgy.
00:11:22
Speaker
With, uh, I mean, that was in my experience, I felt very judged and someone actually said to me once, Oh, I suppose you think you're better than everybody else because you never suck dick to get your fix. And I thought it really would be a dick move to say, yeah, I do because I mean, I maintained.
00:11:44
Speaker
that I didn't have a drug problem, that what I had was a financial problem. And if I was able to afford all the drugs that I wanted, there would be no problem. And that this was not the kind of thing that happened to rich people, which I mean, there is truth to that certainly. But the other side of that was that I had my own issues that I really didn't want to deal with. And
00:12:05
Speaker
You know how it is. Eventually life doesn't give you the choice to not deal with it. You either deal with it or you lose everything. That's 100% true. And I think you actually hit on something that I wanted to comment on, which is that having a family history of addiction and substance abuse, that recognizing that and putting that piece into the puzzle that is your recovery,
00:12:35
Speaker
is very different than blaming people or using it as an excuse, because there is a genetic component to chemical addiction. So to ignore that under the guise of saying, well, I don't want to blame my ancestors for my problem is
00:12:53
Speaker
I mean, it's not just self-defeating, it's actually not factually correct to say that your family history and your DNA doesn't have an impact because it absolutely does. In my family, you can look at the family tree and point to all the people that are bipolar
00:13:11
Speaker
and point to the people that are addicted. And I mean, it's very, very clear that you look at our family tree and there are some of these people that are like super high performing, they're wealthy, they have great jobs, they have a bunch of kids, they're all well adjusted. And then there's other people that are like constantly struggling, might maybe have gotten a degree, maybe have a decent job, maybe have a relationship that lasts, but probably
Humor as Coping Mechanism
00:13:36
Speaker
not. It's far more transient than some of us.
00:13:39
Speaker
And it's real, real obvious if you take a step back and look at the patterns. But when you're in the middle of it, you know, this, this trip to the bar or you, you know, being on the floor again, looking up, wondering how the hell you got there. You aren't necessarily going to be remembering that, yeah, grandpa used to drink an awful lot, didn't he? Like that's, that's not what you're going to be thinking about. You know, it's kind of like when you talk about having anxiety or depression.
00:14:09
Speaker
and not recognizing that as a medical or mental health problem. Because if your life sucks, then you probably just feel like you're reacting appropriately to what's around you. Some people have a life that when they tell you about it, it seems like it would be mental illness if you were not anxious when you have so much stuff going on. Correct. So yeah, man, that is a crazy story, man. I had no idea that it was that rough for you. Is there anything
00:14:38
Speaker
that you think could have helped you earlier in the process? Like maybe helped you gain perspective or realization earlier so that maybe you didn't have to lose so much to find your way?
00:14:56
Speaker
and an actual real intervention, like a TV show, A&E intervention. One of my favorite anecdotes from rehab was,
00:15:09
Speaker
There was a day that I was in what I called adventure class. We were at the river. It's not a heavily flowing river, but it's beautiful. And we're like, all right, let's see who can walk all the way across to the other side. If you want to, you don't have to. And so I was like, yeah, this is great. And I put on some water shoes that were a little too big.
00:15:35
Speaker
While I was on my way out there, I slipped on a rock. My shoe came off and I fell onto my knees, onto the rocks in the river. And I said out loud, well, there it is. I finally hit rock bottom.
00:15:58
Speaker
Exactly. Even at my lowest, I still had to use my, my humor and my inherent kind of like joy that is always somewhere inside me. Humor. I mean, it's so important as a coping mechanism, but I think that people discount, uh, like you said, it's, it's such a.
00:16:26
Speaker
You know what, I'm going to find joy in this. It's awful. It's, it's fucking up my life, but there is joy to be had here. And by God, I'm going to find it. For me, humor has always, always also been one of my primary four forms of communication.
Socio-Political Frustrations
00:16:42
Speaker
You know, someone will know me better if we have a conversation and I throw some puns in or I make some silly references, turn the conversation into a 9 11 conversation.
00:16:56
Speaker
which I'm very good at doing, very adept at taking any conversation and weaving it around into, well, you know, after 9-11.
00:17:06
Speaker
Well, I mean, I don't even know if we want to get into socio-politics at all. We do that a lot on this show and it always ends up making me mad. I have people that I like on the show and we typically agree on most things. I don't think I've had a big disagreement with a guest yet. So a lot of it is a lot of
00:17:26
Speaker
Don't you just hate how this is happening in the world and this and this? Yes, I do. Isn't Trump bad? Yeah, he's bad. And we aren't really saying anything that's new or insightful. We just want to complain about things we don't like.
00:17:43
Speaker
And there's a place for that, but probably not when people are spending their day listening to you and possibly just wanting to get away from that. I love John Hodgman, the comedian. He does a lot of great stand-up, great content. Dana Gould, too, is someone that I listen to a lot. And I bought a new collection of their stand-up. Actually, Dana Gould was more recently
00:18:09
Speaker
And I'm like, oh, I just I can't wait to just listen to comedy and not have to think about the world. And the first fucking thing he started talking about was Trump. No, no, no, I want away from this. Well, you know, I have that that problem with Don Jr. So.
00:18:26
Speaker
I spent a summer taking mushrooms so that I could finish the third book in my savior trilogy and figure out how that story ends. Well, I ended up, the thing is I had the book mostly drafted. And then the thing is that in the third book, it's called the president's son saves the world. And he was supposed to just fall ass backward into Middle East peace. And that's what he did in the book. And then, you know,
00:18:54
Speaker
Yeah. Maybe Netanyahu with all of his bullshit. And I mean, I don't want to like go into that whole thing because I'm certainly lacking the, the expertise and historical knowledge to discuss it intelligently. If you're hurting civilians, fucking stop. You know, I don't care what land you think you deserve or whatever the fuck. I don't own any land. Most people don't. So if you're hurting people because you want something that you don't have, you're the bad guy and stop it.
00:19:23
Speaker
Yeah. You know, the only thing I have to say about that is it, the most basic ethical moral tenet of any belief system or any, any sort of philosophy, there is a basic thing of don't kill someone else. Right. Don't hurt people. Just don't hurt people.
00:19:50
Speaker
The problem, the one problem, authoritatively I say the problem. One of the biggest problems for me that I've seen is assholes. You just have a lot of people who just want to be an asshole. They feel so much better when they're an asshole and they talk shit to you and they
00:20:13
Speaker
uh, complain about you when you're not around and everything is your fault. And, you know, why do you respect me? I know what's best. You know, fuck you. And you have to really wonder like how much of that is them coping with feelings of
00:20:32
Speaker
inadequacy. I mean, like Trump obviously is just a walking, I mean, it's been even when I was a little kid in the 80s and would see him with his gold plated everything and think, wow, what a small person. What kind of grown ass man needs things like that to help him feel like a success? You know, it's that Game of Thrones line, like he would burn everything to the ground if he could be king of the ashes.
00:20:57
Speaker
I knew before I knew anything about before I knew too much about the guy, I just was like, this guy's like the McDonald's of rich people. That's so accurate. And, you know, I am one of those unfortunate souls who
00:21:19
Speaker
follows politics, geopolitics. How many people are trying to take away rights from everyone else, trying to just push their own bullshit on other people who can't? Well, and the people that yak the most. Well, right. I mean, if you can't shut up about freedom and how important freedom is, and you should get to do anything you want because freedom, freedom, freedom.
00:21:45
Speaker
And then out of your next breath, you're banning books and telling people you're going to arrest them for taking their kid to a doctor. And I could remember politicians being straight up disqualified by the public because they yelled really loud during a speech or they misspelled a word or just some crazy thing. And then you've got Trump like literally saying, yeah, I could murder someone and I wouldn't lose any fans. And I thought, wow, what a flourish ass. What kind of a person?
00:22:13
Speaker
hey wait a minute and then you know three years goes by and you realize that he's right you know he could shoot someone and those people that support him would not care you say like well he's been accused of over 40 sexual assaults oh we don't care well but he stole documents and his son-in-law sold him to the Saudis oh we don't care like well what the hell do you care about if those things don't bother you like tell me what you think an American patriot is and
00:22:43
Speaker
Yeah, I've never once liked the answer I've gotten from asking that question. So I've stopped asking it. You know, it's a completely unoriginal statement that he is a poor person's idea of what a rich person is. He's a human embodiment of lifestyles of the rich and famous. It's all a TV show. And behind the curtain, it's just someone who never
00:23:12
Speaker
fully developed emotional capacity, you know, a true sociopath, true psychopath, and the problem is is that there's a big word, freedom, and then there's a little word freedom, and that's what
00:23:30
Speaker
That's what a lot of these pseudo patriots are obsessed with. They're obsessed with my personal freedom immediately. And fuck anyone else who tries to get in the way of that. We elected an actual con man. Like a real genuine con man.
00:23:49
Speaker
capital A asshole who has sold millions of people on the idea of the fiction of an American dream. You know, I long for the days when I can comfortably call myself a thousand there, but I am rarely there. The thing, the thing though, like for me personally, I have to say, I was also raised by a narcissistic sociopath who liked to punctuate their points with violence. Like that's, that's what I grew up in.
00:24:17
Speaker
And in my family, there was a very delineated difference between what our family was actually like and what we were supposed to be like when there was company. And I think that more than any other thing is why from a very, I mean, I was a teenager, Don Jr. was probably about 12 when I was like, okay, that kid is monstrously unhappy and he is trying so hard
00:24:48
Speaker
to stay good in a family that taught him that lying is is the only right way to be and telling the truth is is naive and trusting people is gullible and and i really saw him for years and years as someone who was surrounded by terrible people teaching him awful things and that he really wanted to be good and i believe that through like
00:25:14
Speaker
2017, I was telling everybody like, no, no, no, Don Jr. doesn't believe this MAGA shit. He doesn't believe any of it. He's not mean. He's not a bully. He's not stupid and selfish and fucked up like that. And then he was doing this thing where he was going to build low income housing, right?
00:25:31
Speaker
So I was like, see, see, I told you guys, I told you, this is a fake out. He's pretended to be bad so that he can get inside there and like do good things. And I was so like, yay, I've been vindicated. Everybody's gonna see that Don Jr's a good, wait, what happened? Nobody got paid? Nothing got billed? It was all a lie from the beginning, man.
00:25:55
Speaker
I think I was more upset than the homeless people that thought they were getting homes and didn't. I mean, I just, I was horrified. And then I found out like how he treated his wife and how he treated like his various mistresses. And you know, it turns out like what I'm left with now trying to write this third book and finish this trilogy is that I can't figure out
00:26:20
Speaker
whether I was always wrong and he was never a good person and he was never trying to be good, which like I can live with that. I can live with being wrong about something. But if I'm right and he was good all along and this, I mean, there was a, I'm not going to go into a specific event about his life, but he got his heart badly, badly broken. If he was a good person and now he's this,
00:26:47
Speaker
That makes him a coward and that hurts me to my soul because that's not even just a loss to me. That's, that's the whole world. There are so few people in the world that have money and brains and power and connections who could actually do good things. And if you'll notice, most of them are just huge caustic assholes. You know, Elon Musk said, if somebody does the math and shows him the numbers, he'll end world hunger with his money.
00:27:16
Speaker
And someone did show him the numbers and then he didn't do it. He built himself a rocket ship and bought Twitter instead. And you know what I always say, if some butts were candies and nuts, we'd all have a Merry Christmas. And, you know, when you have, when you have fuck you money, it's just like the dude said on the fucking Access Hollywood tape.
00:27:39
Speaker
When you're rich, they let you do it. You get away with shit. What are we looking at right now? He's getting away with everything. But it's not like he's a guy that's going to go away because he's a con man and he has to get the rift going. Well, and the thing is, he's not going to get the most votes. He's never gotten the most votes. But what I am very concerned about this time is how those people, like those culty MAGA armed to the teeth people,
00:28:06
Speaker
are going to take it when he doesn't get the most votes yet again. Because they're going to take it worse than ever this time. Because what I keep saying to these people when I talk to them, which is still fairly often, they're still saying that the 2020 election was stolen. And if that's what you believe, that Biden stole an election while Trump was in office,
00:28:30
Speaker
What's changed? What would even be the point of voting this time if you believe that the last election was stolen? It makes no sense to vote this time. Now I'm a normal person, so I know that nothing was stolen and of course we're going to vote again. But my God, if somehow he gets back in office, we're not going to have votes anymore. Or we're going to have those like Putin-esque votes where, you know, they put up like, you know, the Gilbert Gottfried equivalent of a politician and nobody votes for them.
00:29:00
Speaker
It's legitimately frightening in a way that even, because like I thought Bush losing to Gore technically was awful and would hurt us a lot. And it did, but it wasn't going to destroy democracy. And this very well could. Yeah.
Music in Recovery
00:29:17
Speaker
I spend a lot of time consuming content about
00:29:23
Speaker
the threat democracy is under. And I have gamed out October to December several times because I also grew up in a Pentecostal church. So I grew up around evangelicals and I learned all about
00:29:48
Speaker
the rapture and the tribulation and all the stuff that's not really biblical, but is part of their mythology, you know, the, the war and strife that's happening in what they would consider, you know, Jesus's homeland. That's supposed to happen. That's supposed to happen for Jesus to, you know, fly back down in his flaming chariot.
00:30:12
Speaker
And so what they see is prerequisites. And when they see Donald Trump, instead of seeing him for what he actually is, which is the Antichrist, I've never seen a human more clearly the biblical, mythical Antichrist, other than Trump. I have to correct you there.
00:30:38
Speaker
based on my own understanding of the Antichrist, a lot of which comes from the Omen movies. But my understanding, though, is that the Antichrist is legitimately successful in business and in politics. From the Eternal Sea, he rises, which is the line about if the Eternal Sea is politics.
00:31:01
Speaker
I mean, if we're going there, if we're going to determine whether or not that particular person is the Antichrist, I would say no, because the Antichrist would be less obvious, more beloved by more people, because it's real obvious that those people are not well, you know, that there's like two kinds of those people, there's all the broken deplorables, and then there's the
00:31:28
Speaker
greedy rich a-holes who don't believe any of the churchy stuff, they just want the power. But then there are people who are genuinely just extra, super, hyper conservative Christians who believe in Armageddon. They believe in an end times mythology. And how I would counter your argument for
00:31:52
Speaker
him not being the Antichrist because he is not wasn't successful in business, but he was because he managed to stay afloat and relevant long enough to become the most powerful person in the world. But he inherited $400 million. And I'd say that that is it's very successful of him to have to have not
00:32:18
Speaker
permanently squandered all of that the way a lot of actual fail sons would do. He fell backwards into a real estate market at a time when New York was just growing and becoming the New York that it is now and all that.
00:32:35
Speaker
I actually, I would love to get away from politics for a bit because boy, does it make me mad. Well, the thing is you're a musician, you make music. And the thing is I cannot make music. It is the one thing that I absolutely have zero talent at, which means when I consume music, I'm not like mentally deconstructing it as I'm listening to it the way that I am with like books and films and TV shows. You can actually just enjoy it and derive
00:33:06
Speaker
the pleasure that comes from hearing enjoyable music. Yes, so as a musician, how does that concept impact you? Does it detract from your enjoyment of other people's music? I have been deeply listening to music for, you know, like 30 years at this point. My favorite musical artist was Paula Abdul up until sixth grade.
00:33:33
Speaker
fifth grade, fifth, sixth grade, that's when the hormones start kicking in. You know, I started getting real into grunge, alternative rock, you know, and I was always trying to seek out as much obscure stuff as I could. And I, I have an analytical brain when I hear music just from playing it for so long, but I also, I can enjoy
00:34:01
Speaker
I can enjoy music that's enjoyable. I don't have to be hypercritical of it. I don't have to be listening to Rush to be like, this is good music. I listen to Tool because I think it sounds good, not because of the Fibonacci sequence or whatever.
00:34:20
Speaker
Oh, Maynard and his Fibonacci sequence. Yeah, you know, it's, everybody wants to feel smart. And as musicians, the way that we feel smart is by being clever. I've hit a point as a musician where the stuff that I've been writing since I started writing music again, which, you know, I gave up on for the majority of the time that I was in active addiction.
00:34:49
Speaker
It wasn't until, you know, the pandemic really, when the pandemic started and I started getting those unemployment checks, we were able to buy an electric piano. I was able to buy a guitar for the first time in, you know, 15 years. And then teaching myself how to play things and how to write stuff on piano.
00:35:12
Speaker
but I'm not technically proficient at it, but I'm good enough and I've got the heart. I've got the spirit.
Art as Emotional Outlet
00:35:20
Speaker
That's what's really always been most important to me is how does the music make you feel? And I- It's interesting that you say that because it actually makes me think of something that is being discussed right now in terms of AI, because unlike writing and visual art,
00:35:42
Speaker
As far as I know, music is not being taken over by AI, even though music is the most inherently mathematical and in my opinion, like the most susceptible to algorithms. It's also the biggest of all of the creative art forums. It's the one that has the deepest and most unintelligible theory. Like you have to know a lot about music.
00:36:09
Speaker
to really understand it. And you have to understand why people make music. And AI can't do that. AI can be useful if we're writing something that's like how to get an oil change. When should you get an oil change? But what AI is doing, as far as generative AI with text, is it's just imitating. It's just a mimic.
00:36:38
Speaker
with music, AI can completely mimic artists, not artistry, but just sounds. Like you can look at lyrics and be like, oh, okay, so this person writes a lot of lyrics that are like in this list over here that means sad. But there's no understanding of human feeling. There's no understanding of, you know, I don't mean like a literal transubstantial soul, but the human spirit.
00:37:08
Speaker
that. Yes. And even with any kind of competent music, whether it's shiny pop, you know, radio, hip hop, or garbage country music, there's always going to be a dichotomy. There's a red line. Do I like to hear this? Or is this not enjoyable?
00:37:38
Speaker
And one of the reasons is because, you know, pop music, what does it make you want to do? It makes you want to dance. You know, country music, what does it do? If it's good, it makes you forlorn.
00:37:53
Speaker
Heavy metal? Heavy metal? When you hear it, it's supposed to get your blood boiling. It's a cathartic medium. I'm in a metal band I've been playing off and on with since I was 18. We get together a few years. We're actually going to be playing some shows in Michigan this May and get the gang back together. But it's a hodgepodge of people who are in the band over various parts of time. What I've been writing.
00:38:21
Speaker
with the poetry that I've been composing and the songs and the lyrics that I've been writing. My biggest goal is for someone to hear it and to feel what I'm trying to convey. I want them to hear the journey, the evolution that I'm trying to sing about.
00:38:50
Speaker
My other song is ostensibly my break-up song. And it's literally called, Now It's Dark, which is a reference to Blue Velvet. The chorus starts, is this dark enough for you to see that the light is dying? And it's such a dark song. And it's because I have two choices.
00:39:16
Speaker
I can either shove that darkness deep, deep back inside the way I did for years and years by covering it with booze, by drowning it away, or I can release it and create something. And if no one ever hears it, if no one ever enjoys it, I still have the satisfaction of knowing that I had
00:39:42
Speaker
the energy that I had to wherewithal and that I had the commitment and the heart to write something, to record something, to create art for the sake of art and for the sake of my mental and emotional health. And eventually I had to stop and I had to write songs about how I felt when I was heartbroken, how I felt when I felt alone.
00:40:10
Speaker
through going through a recovery program and coming home and having several months of not knowing what I was doing, couldn't hold down a job for more than a month or two. The pandemic, it sucked for everything, but it was beneficial to me because it gave me the chance
00:40:38
Speaker
to stop and to think about what I wanted to do with my life. What could I do with my life? And I'm currently happy and satisfied that what I'm doing with my life is trying to enjoy every single day and trying to create
00:41:00
Speaker
to process my emotions properly. I recently had to drop therapy because of health insurance reasons. Complete just a big whoopsie. That sucks. In the meantime, I have to start journaling. I have to write down my thoughts because I can't talk to them or talk to someone about them. This is making me feel great already because I'm just
00:41:30
Speaker
getting so much emotion out to you. And that's, I mean, that's the thing about creating in general, you know, whether you're a musician or a writer or a visual artist is that not only are you finding new ways to express what you feel, but then when other people consume that content, you've created like not just a bond between yourself and your listeners or your readers or whatever, but also,
00:41:58
Speaker
like you've given other people the gift of seeing what they're feeling in a new way so you're helping people understand themselves better and what they're feeling and music in particular because man music like there are so like everybody has a song that reminds them of a time in their life where they just kept listening to that song because it meant so much to them whether it was because
00:42:24
Speaker
you know, they missed out on a big life opportunity or there was a breakup, you know, breakups in particular are like, you know, there's, I mean, there are songs now that I cannot hear without thinking about some man from my past that, you know, like the day that I first fell in love with so and so, or the day that such and such said that they were going to break up with me or, you know, whatever, like,
00:42:48
Speaker
It's, you know, 20, 30 years later. And I'm like, oh, please don't play the Rolling Stones. Please don't play that album. You know, like I cannot hear Freebird today. I can't. As you could no doubt hear, we were beset by technical issues this week. The interview was so good, though. I wanted to bring you as much of it as we could.
00:43:11
Speaker
Apologies that we did not make it to the Mad Lib. A pot being cut out on us that I really don't know why. But rest assured, I'll be taking it up with them. Stay tuned as Matt was kind enough to give us a song to play. So we will be doing that next. And that's it. So we'll see everybody next week.
00:44:46
Speaker
All of my angels are starting to wail, buried up to my neck, floating beneath my feet. Find out the garden, poison the well, all of my demons
00:45:15
Speaker
on you
00:46:25
Speaker
No tell, tell, all of my nightmares are wishing me well. It is long enough for you to see that the light is dying.
00:46:54
Speaker
It's
00:47:19
Speaker
to see that
00:47:48
Speaker
you
00:48:49
Speaker
Thank you for listening to The Mentally Oddcast, brought to you by Sometimes Hilarious Horror. Visit us on ko-fi.com. Sometimes Hilarious Horror. My name is Wednesday Lee Friday, the host of The Mentally Oddcast. We have new episodes every Wednesday. Be sure to like and subscribe wherever you listen. Thanks everyone. See you next week.