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okay here i want to hear you loud i want to hear that beautiful voice of yours your beautiful newsies and accent oh yeah wait two too loud he asked if he could turn me up just so he could say too loud it was all just so he no it
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wasn't it was all it was laddering up to that one moment i'm literally by one what like this here right this one i don't know what size it's on for you it's still clogged with uh fluid from shooting a video that i just did
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last week and i told you i was gonna do which song was it i shot a video for don't chase the dead with uh norman reedus uh from milwaukee dead then that is my second favorite song on the album oh thank you right now what's your voice right now broken needle i appreciate that what is the last sentence on the album are you quizzing me i'll never ever play you again so it's a bit of a play on words and that comparing a relationship to some to an lp
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in a sense and putting it away ever scratch up and not wanting to hear that memory again so i just started thinking about or at least a year and a half before the pandemic happened that it was about evaluate for me evaluating my own mental health and what i wanted to say not knowing what would come but the idea of sometimes there's things that have happened in the past you have to forget about the who you were think about who you want to be
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not to sound like a motivational speaker but just thinking about the past you know were there sad ports were there strong points what did you feel there was never no one's ever had an idyllic upbringing if you had you probably would
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we wouldn't have this conversation right now it would be boring i mean because it's almost the sense of all of the kids in school at least for my opinion the ones i got picked on had to try harder to be creative so once i had everything handed to them
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didn't try harder and they end up being the bullies and we're in a bully culture where it's like names and and blames and we just need to move past all that at this point but a lot of that was going through my head i wrote that song and on the lp itself sorry if this is a spoiler alert a lot of people have received the lp already it just stays it gets stuck on that last song until you take the needle off so it continuously plays in perpetuity
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until you remove it so that leads me to my next question which is how does shooter jennings who is the only son of wayland jennings in original modern out you know country music outlaw and the antichrist superstar who for the
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longest time seems to have reveled in the chaos upon which you talk on this album make an album that is the easily the deepest most personal reflective album you've ever made in your entire career and one that seems to me is searching
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for a pathway through to inspire rather than to light the flame to set the chaos into motion that's what i get from it thank you sometimes that you need the fire to burn things down metaphorically to build them back up
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so there's that element but i don't think that we really were considering that so much is that we wanted to make something that was while we were listening to diamond dogs and other records that were shooter was inspired by antichrist
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superstar and i did not know that and i was inspired by black ribbons his album not knowing each other still when we got together it just sort of mounted into this it can't be only the lyrics it has to do a lot with
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the melodies in which he evokes and sometimes conjured me to come up with lines or melodies and then sometimes you know they would feed off one another but we didn't expect it to be quite of the moment that it is right now but i think it's
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i wanted to make a record that was always of the moment where it's yeah we've ever can you ever think of an idyllic time that's ever been really happened in life there's never really been a true perfect era for anyone so this is a bad
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time for everyone but it's not any worse than what i grew up hearing my father talk about with the vietnam war and that's just my own personal experience everyone has had their own their own rough and their own way of interpreting the world where it's
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none of it's gonna ever be perfect but i think if one way you could look at if all artists decide to stop making art the entire world will fall apart it remains one of the only pure filters right now especially and i've spoken to this to this end with a few people about the the voice of the artist and the fact that it if you choose to put a record out right now and and even back in the day there may have been an influencing factor from a label
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saying this is too much we can't there are pa there are people who are paying out what wages who don't want this you've been on the receiving end of those conversations i know you have but you can do it yourself now
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you're in a position whereby you can find the purest filter in order to express yourself and and more than ever before we need that well not just musical artists when you think about architects uh painters clothing designers what you do
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everybody who does something that adds to the world is the opposite of most politics and religion which was my initial i guess hard-on or anger against the world because i was unsatisfied with seeing politicians who are
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older people that that's not about because they're older it's just people that are not of the culture they're representing there's an institutionalization that comes from that thinking over time and i suppose two questions bring to mind
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i'll start with the first one um do you feel proven right then if you arrived with something to say based on those two touch points you know politics and religion that's who i'm up against right now and then take a look at where we are
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in society and what is occupying a lot of the debate and causing a lot of the disruption do you feel to some degree like you're on the right path and you've been proven correct well i feel that being sticking to art
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is being on the right path because all we have right now we have art music movies that's that's and books and paintings and whatever it is that inspires you but without that all we have is just propaganda and and it doesn't
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really matter who's writer who's wrong it's not even worth having a conversation about but it's the conversation should be about everyone should figure out who they want to be not who they were and forget about your childhood scars
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mentally you know physically whatever they are and rise above because now is the time for people to come together and not in a hippie way as much as in a united way with art because if you didn't have art you wouldn't have anything we
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wouldn't have this we wouldn't have this camera that's filming us we wouldn't have that couch or sitting on but for the longest time i think if you asked anybody about marilyn manson even people who weren't necessarily
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big fans of yours but aware of your presence because yeah you have a strong presence then you'd ask is marilyn manson the kind of person who's trying to build people up and build up a strong foundation upon
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which to better understand each other or is he trying to tear it down you know what the answer would have been now would they have been right back then or has everyone got you wrong the whole time if they could would have been right back then we
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wouldn't be here now probably essentially because i was saying i could just say the same thing now if you went back and rewind and listen to antichrist superstar it could it could translate in some ways there's things that were said in 1984 that could translate to right now because the world doesn't always change it is a time as a flat circle and things come back to themselves but mostly i had joy making this record which sounds
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very unlike what you'd expect for me to say i don't know if joy's the correct word i always thought you had joy in making your music i enjoy taking the piss out of people too you know i enjoy sh i enjoy being against the grain
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you know and i'm not trying to be some sort of uh hero or someone who's trying to help others i'm just trying to relate in the same way i did from the beginning to other people like me or anyone who anyone who's not if like i'm not trying to
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be a pop artist that writes songs to uplift people for the their own benefit which is usually self-serving and not naming any names or anything like that but just throughout history like we are the world and things like that
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whatever if those things accomplish something that's not even an example but just i'm trying to make songs that people that i think are like me could potentially benefit from just by listening to you talked about getting to a place
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where you can you can look to your future and you can build yourself the person you want to be and not be tied to who you were and what you've done in the past when people come to that realization normally what follows is that there's a need to do the work right and established ways people do that are like therapy or um they get clean they go to rehab they do whatever they need to do in order to try to clear a road map for them to make a future
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and not be stuck as a broken needle on the record how did you get to that place where you could make this album because there's a lot i'm sure that's that's tucked away was this a follow-on from your last album and from
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the process of losing a parent and losing your father i think mortality obviously sets in when you lose both your parents you know within a short period of time which everyone has to go through it sucks and i'm for everyone who's going to
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experience that which eventually everyone has to unless some sort of science fiction process happens it makes you question who your family is it makes you make sometimes foolish decisions about trusting people because you're your heart's wide open when making this record with shooter because we both lost our fathers and we bonded over that in a sense and his father was musical outlaw as you said my father was you know also in his own right
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a real but outlaw you know i mean he was yeah he did not play by the rules you know but but he raised me to be who i am and i'm not ashamed of that i'm you know it just sometimes you miss you you miss you lost ones but i tried to put that into
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the music and i tried to make this record also a story that's not just about me it's about i mean ideally if i could have made a book of it it would just be mirrors for pages literally so you could just see your own story in
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it and uh you know starting out with the intro i think it it was meant to set a tone that was prose that i wrote on the moment i had it in my head but it was on the moment i wanted to introduce the record so that it would sort of
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an integrate movie or tv show or book or play or well i was going to ask if that was a scene how would you direct it what would that scene look like it would look like it sounds it would just i don't even think it needs a visual
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i i think just listening to it uh and it's surprising because a lot of people say to me when they hear it they say there's no such thing as a king b and i say well there is now because it's you know it's i'm a writer so i'm allowed to take as many liberties i want when it comes to making up new words new ideas set fire to the tree of life though right is that is that a reflection of mortality as well i think so yeah i i buried my parents ashes
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in a tree so that it would grow it's a dogwood tree which is uh i guess methyl mythology dictates or christian mythology that that's the it's a tree that i had growing up and it has these white flowers that have
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blood sort of stains almost pink in the center and my mother always told me it was in my backyard that it was meant to represent the stigmata of christ i don't know if that's true but i just thought that that was the best tree to plant and that
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to put my parents remains there so that they would always be and they'd grow into something so it's that cycle of life is there a spiritual reason for that as well as returning to the earth is there is there has it awakened a different side of your spirituality going getting to this place spiritually in that i believe that there's far more evil in the world than what people consider me to be which is not a very obvious statement
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anyone could make that observation but you know i've been blamed for so many wrongdoings that had nothing to do with me but as far as sin and accountability and things like that which i grew up in christian school so the natural order would be
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for my brain to rebel against it and instead i think that i didn't embrace it this is not a return for me like i didn't somehow find religion or sobriety or something like that i found a focus and it was a focus on realizing my
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importance as a human being in the world you have an importance for you you know doing this that you do and it's your passion this is mine and everyone has it doesn't have to be the same as ours but everyone has it once you find that it kind of shuts out all of the darkness around you and how did it feel when you lost that how did it feel when you felt like what you were doing and making records and touring is that when you were losing yourself
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and coping mechanisms and such because you weren't connecting to your purpose yeah i think i was a little lost as far as i didn't know who i was so i didn't know who to believe in when it comes to believing in yourself
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so i think sometimes you really have to step back and it's never easy but when it comes to especially now this is different because now we're talking this way as opposed to how we have talked when we met you know 20 years ago you know it's a
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different culture and a different scenario that we're that we're stuck with so we deal with it and that's a way that real strong people deal with things they face the problem and they either conquered or they suffer from it and not everybody's strong enough so i tried to you know channel my own strength to make myself capable of dealing with it because it's not it's it's never easy to be in a position where you don't have any control that's
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the worst possible thing like if you have an ill parent and you can't do anything about it you feel helpless if you're stuck in your house and your work you can't do you're helpless for us fortunately and for me making this record
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luckily somehow it was finished for the most part far before uh any of the pandemic hit it was in january when we really finished it and it was never really written about this but it seems as if it became the moment where it was supposed to happen you