["Father of Mine"].
Speaker 2:Welcome to the Truman Charities Podcast. I am DeMarie Truman, your host. I'm sure you all remember this song, father of Mine, from Everclear's Double Platinum album. So much for the afterglow For my upcoming podcast, flashbook's, coming out early next year. I'm focusing on the impact fathers have in a child's life.
Speaker 2:I reached out to the lead singer of Everclear, art Alizakis, to learn about the story behind his hit song Father of Mine. We talk about the impact that has had on him and his family growing up with an absentee father, the struggles he faced while growing up and how he was able to break the cycle and become a loving husband and father to his wife and two beautiful daughters, and advice he has for young men facing the same struggles that he faced while growing up. Last but definitely not least, we talk about his upcoming tour and where you can purchase tickets. I personally will be front and center at the Fillmore in Silver Spring on September 13th to see Everclear. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. I look forward to seeing you September 13th at the Showmore. Hi Art, how are you?
Speaker 3:I'm good. Good morning Jamie. How are you?
Speaker 2:Great, it's kind of surreal talking to you. I at least still listen to your music. I mean I still do. But gosh, it's, I mean since I was in middle school, everclear has been around since 91. So I yeah, I grew up listening to your music 92.
Speaker 2:92,. Okay, Wow, yeah. So I know some of my favorite songs Santa Monica and Everybody Knows I Will Buy you a New Life and, of course, my ultimate favorite, Father of Mine, which we are going to be talking about later. Okay, so you have been very well-respected musician and artist and I'm excited to learn a little bit more about you and about you know your writing, Sure. So first I wanted to start out. I've watched several interviews of you, gosh, over the years, and I know that you have mentioned that your father left when you were young, when you were five years old, and I wanted to know do you have any memories, I mean, if any of your early childhood, of your family dynamic?
Speaker 3:I absolutely do. Yeah, my memories go back to about when I was three years old, which is pretty normal, but their images, their kind of splintered in the images. I remember my dad and my mom. He left when I was six and he was abusive, mostly mentally and verbally, to my mother. It became physically abusive and that's when my mom left him, which was a very brave thing for a woman to do in the late 60s Because there still wasn't a very good stigma about divorced women you know, but she did it because it was the right move to do for her children.
Speaker 3:And even though she's passed, I'm still very proud of my mother. I was raised by my mother, by a single mom, and my dad should have moved down the street and raised his kids, you know, but he didn't. He went to the other side of the country, married a younger woman, raised her kids. So I didn't really know my dad. I met him like a few times over the years. He called very sporadically, literally like in the song, sent me five bucks on my birthday. You know I was still calling me cowboy when I was 12, 13, 14 years old, Because last time he knew me, you know, when I was five or six, I wanted to be a cowboy, you know.
Speaker 3:So my relationship with my dad was always like that. I lived with him for a short while because I was getting in trouble with my teen years, but we never really connected, we never really gelled, you know. And it's interesting because my father died a few years ago and he died three days before David Bowie died and I was sad about my dad but I didn't really know him that well. I knew him but I just he didn't give me all that much. David Bowie died. It broke my heart Because even though I'd met him once in passing as an artist, he had given me so much over the years Really just so much that at times, just being who he was impressed me. So that's my kind of juxtaposition between a rock star giving more than my own father did. He never paid child support, he never supported anything. He I blamed him for years.
Speaker 3:But with my brother's death, my brother died at an overdose when he was 21. I was 12. And the breakup was really hard on him. You know, I was young enough that I think kids weren't in their teens, Were younger and adapt to divorce better, especially when the parents handle it better. But to be fair to both of them, to be fair to my father and my mother, in the late 60s no one knew how to be divorced. Very few people knew how to be divorced. Right, that's true, yeah.
Speaker 2:They weren't brought up there.
Speaker 3:That was the stigma. That was the last, last, last resort and you were ashamed for life. That was the idea that people put into each other's head about what divorce was about, and unfortunately, it just left a lot of damaged people like myself. Yeah, so when your mom moved and they separated and got divorced.
Speaker 2:How old were your siblings at the time? Were you the youngest? Yeah, I was. I'm the baby. There was five kids.
Speaker 3:My oldest sister, paula was already out of the house.
Speaker 3:She had already gotten married and had a baby by the time she was 18, barely 18, maybe 17, 18. There's a picture of her in her graduation, ground down with a very pregnant stomach. But this was the late 60s. But she and I were the only ones still alive. I had a brother, so it was girl boy. George Kiki was my middle sister, Vicky was the sister right above me, About five years ahead of me. And then the accident baby. That happened when my family moved to California from Detroit in the late 50s. I was born in 62.
Speaker 2:So they hadn't planned on a fifth child, but there you go.
Speaker 3:What are you going to do?
Speaker 2:And so you do think, as you were saying a little bit earlier, that they took it a lot harder than you did at first. Then you did at first destroyed and destroyed.
Speaker 3:Yeah my whole family was just drugs and alcohol, especially with my brother, and my other sister's first husband was just rampant. It's late 60s, early 70s and my sisters just were kind of lost and they kind of in hindsight they were kind of lost their whole lives and it's just, it's so, so important and I got to tell you, as a father, I take it so seriously and this honor of being a parent, because everything is going to affect them. Everything, negative or positive, is going to affect your children somewhere down the line and I just especially being a role model as a male for daughters all I have is daughters. I have two dogs. Do you have sons?
Speaker 2:I have all sons, all sons.
Speaker 3:All three boys. See, you've, obviously your husband, had good karma, I have horrible karma, so I have some daughters and that's fine, that's fine. I accept it 100%, because there's no, no one loves you more than a daughter loves her daddy. So she's about 12 or 13.
Speaker 2:I think that's for most kids, and then it just kind of it's just no debt. But then they come. They come back up like early 20s.
Speaker 3:I hope to see that my oldest hasn't come back to me or her mom yet, but I hope that that's the case. But she's doing really well. That's all I care about she's. She's happy and and flourishing. My youngest daughter is just like the apple apple my, that sounds so stupid, but it's really just she's just she and my wife. Our family right now is so strong and a large part of that is because of my sobriety. I'm about to hit 34 years of sober. I work my program very hard. I have a great fellowship, I have a great spiritual relationship and I just love what I do. I'm 61 year old guy with MS. I get to play rock and roll for a living.
Speaker 2:Can we talk a little bit about. So you say you're 34 years sober, you've been through sprit sprit, sprit, almost 34 years.
Speaker 3:We don't call it that until it's there.
Speaker 2:The 15th is my sobriety birthday, so oh, that's very exciting, yeah, and so what was the moment when you decided that you had to get sober?
Speaker 3:Oh, I had a really, really bad experience. Well, I had many bad experiences. I was a blackout drunk. I'd gotten off hard drugs a few years earlier and I put all the energy into drinking. And regardless of what people tell you I mean, with the exception of, maybe, fentanyl, which we can talk about later, which is horrifying nothing gets you more messed up than alcohol. Alcohol is just so vicious on your body, your soul, your spirit, your mental capacity. If you're addicted to alcohol, if you're truly an alcoholic, as I am, it's. I became a blackout drunker. I would just go to work remember leaving work at lunchtime to go and I just get a drink and then black out and show up. My wife at the time, my first wife, bless her heart would go through bars looking for me because I just disappeared.
Speaker 3:There's cell phones, no pagers just, and I'd show up two or three days later scrapes or bruises all over me. Didn't know how they got there, hands busted up obviously done in fights, you know, just wow.
Speaker 2:Is it just something that when you take a drink, there's just no kind of stopping?
Speaker 3:Yeah. I think, with addicts and we talk about this program, a lot in recovery with. I liken it to like a whole inside of you right.
Speaker 3:And I'm trying to fill the hole. Addicts try to fill the hole with anything that creates dopamine, right Something that's benign as sugar to something as vicious as heroin and cocaine, alcohol, sex power, anger, shame. I would do things that were shameful and it didn't bother me because I understood shame. I call it the warm. I'm writing a book right now and in the book I call it the warm waters of my shame because I felt comfortable there when I felt comfortable when people underestimated me Just incredibly low self-esteem and a lot of that I have to attribute. I'm not trying to point fingers and blame and take things away from me, but when you look at root causes of it, that my family breaking up when I was four or five, six, with the violence and everything that was going along with that, had a horrible impact on me obvious, my whole family.
Speaker 2:Did you find that all? How did you get into music? Did you find that as an escape? Or tell me a little bit about that.
Speaker 3:Well, I remember when I was three, three and a half it must have been 1965 or 1966, my mom would put me to bed in my jammies right and she'd leave the door open so I could hear what was going on, because I didn't like a total dark room and there was like lights coming from the front room and a lot of times I would like sneak out and go hide behind the couch.
Speaker 3:This is the 60s. Her and my dad are sitting there drinking high balls. My mom had the big beard dude. Very sexy, totally sexy. I was peeking around. I heard this music. That was just like. All I remember is. It just made my body vibrate and I went around and looked around the corner of the couch and it was the Beatles on Ed Sullivan. The last time they were on Ed Sullivan and they were playing and I couldn't control myself, I ran to the TV and just started jumping around and of course, my siblings and my mom and dad are laughing about it and I never wanted to do anything else. True, sad. Sad because I got I was a smart kid not great grades but tested really well because I was smart. And my mom wanted me to go to college after I got clean the first time not sober, but clean and I took film because I wanted to do something creative.
Speaker 3:She wanted me to take engineering or something to fall back on.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 3:It's just not me. You can't make your kids you got kids. You can't make them be what you want them to be Right.
Speaker 2:You can't understand why she wanted you to do it Like as a mom you're like the safety of, like you know.
Speaker 3:Of course.
Speaker 2:Absolutely Lawyer engineer something like that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, but now with my children, I want them to find their bliss Right. I want them to find their bliss and be able to monetize it to make a living, Because I never wanted to be rich. I really didn't. If I wanted to be rich, I would have made it much better moves in my career than I did. But I've always wanted to not worry about money, to be comfortable, and I am very comfortable. I'm comfortable enough that I can put my daughter through college when she goes to college, and my eldest daughter. So I'm fortunate, and I get to do it by playing music, which is just. You know that wasn't part of the plan back in the 60s and 70s and 80s. So what do you want to do with your life? I want to play guitar, rock and roll, band man, have family. That's what I wanted. I wanted the white picket fence, but I wanted to play rock and roll, and you know, be careful what you ask for, because that's what I got. Basically, I don't have white picket fence, but I got a nice wall with electric piano.
Speaker 2:So tell me what that feeling was like when you first heard a song of yours on the radio.
Speaker 3:Well, that would go back to like one of my earlier bands on college radio and that was pretty exciting. But when Everclear started breaking and we went from clubs like opening for people or headlining small clubs and Santa Monica over hero, even heroine girl, it just exponentially got bigger. But when Santa Monica hit our first big single it was drastic. It went from us headlining like 300, 400 C clubs to like blowing out 1500 C clubs, extra nights, multiple nights, crowds going around the block. It was amazing. You know, when my aunt, our guy guy, calls me one day and goes just want to let you know you ship gold, you got a gold album, I'm like wow. And then like a week later he goes.
Speaker 1:I was wrong, you don't have a gold album on what, what he goes. No, you get a platinum album.
Speaker 3:Taking my mom to the platinum record party was comedy gold man. She had no idea what was going on.
Speaker 2:I was going to ask you her reaction.
Speaker 3:Well, it's interesting because I told her what was going on. She, just it, just hell, billy man. She's from the deep south and she lived in California and just she was just old school working girl, right, she, just she was a grinder man. She's tenacity, she just she did, always did the right thing and I loved her for it. You know, I was presented to her at times as the kid growing up. Now, looking back, I'm so grateful for every moment I've had with her. But I told her that I'm flying her. She was living in Portland and I said because she wouldn't be near her grandkids. And.
Speaker 3:I had a couple sisters living there at the time, as well as my daughter, and I'm like mom, you're going with me to the platinum record thing I don't know what the hell that is. And I make you know. The stylist lady made her address, we pick her up, we fly first class. And she's like are you sure we're supposed to be up here? We're not supposed to be up here. And then we didn't know we have a limo pick us up right there, pick us up right from the airport, take us to this like big restaurant down in Venice and they've got spotlights and they've got red carpet and paparazzi and all this stuff.
Speaker 3:And she's like boy, she called me boy, boy, is this for you? I go, yeah, mama. She goes what is this platinum thing? I go, I mean this holds a million records. And she's like a million people bought your record, that noisy rock and roll record. And I go, yeah, imagine that I go. It's probably going to go double platinum, the way it's looking. And she's like that's two million. I go, yeah, and she goes this is for you. And we're just sitting inside the limo and people are waiting to open the door and I'm like she's like okay, let's go and I knock on the window and they open it and she's like just waving at people. I always knew that he was going to be something special, but given that tour was just I mean nothing better, no yeah, you know, buying her a house and taking care of her in the last years.
Speaker 3:She died of cancer in 2006. And my oldest sister and me lived in Portland. My sister's like I'll take care of her day to day because you're traveling so much, you just pay all the bills and I'll take care of her and I'm like done Just once a week and I never failed, never missed it. Practice once a week or more, but I was able to spend more and more time with her at the end there and thank God she got to meet my wife now because she didn't like my choice in life earlier. But, man, but she met Vanessa and she was like this is the one Don't screw it up.
Speaker 3:And she didn't say screw, she said don't screw this up.
Speaker 2:Yep, mom's now.
Speaker 3:Yep, listen to your mom, listen Right.
Speaker 2:So when you hear who you are, you have a platinum record, your famous around the world. What was the reaction to? Did you hear from your father at that point? Or what was the reaction from your siblings as well?
Speaker 3:Siblings. Just, I don't want to bad talk the dead, but siblings and their children just hit me up for a lot of money and never paid it back, except for the wife of one of my daughter's sons my daughter, I guess, my niece in law. She brought us some money and paid it back every time, but I knew that was going to happen. I had people in my life my anna guys like look man, people are going to lose their minds. They don't know how to act like this. Because I went from being a kid from the group in a housing project that had always struggled for money to appear, make millions, and it was a different world getting that big house up on the hill, much different from looking outside, looking in and inside looking out. For sure, and it was a hard juxtaposition, for sure, but I don't know. It was a learning experience. It still is and I'm still grateful for all of it, even the hard things, because it makes me a better person from learning from it.
Speaker 3:I'm grateful to my father because for not being there, because it taught me to be able to have to fend for myself in a lot of ways that I shouldn't have at such a young age, but I'm grateful for the strength it gave me for sure, or? We can ask. I'm sorry to interrupt you.
Speaker 2:Oh no, not at all. I was just kind of going to talk a little bit about, really, what you just mentioned, and I wanted to talk about how you came up with Father Mind, which was one of your largest singles.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's probably our second or third largest, but it impacted a lot of people across the board different ethnicities, different people from different economic backgrounds. Primal abandonment is not something that's really get into just one section of our society, it's pervasive. And I remember I was writing songs for our third album, the follow up to Sparkling Thig, which was our first album which had Santa Monica on it, was our second album had Santa Monica on it and I remember putting my baby to my other daughter to sleep. She's five, but she's my baby and just you ever watch your kids sleep. Just watch them sleep.
Speaker 3:Of course it's like, let's do that. Other people think you're insane.
Speaker 2:Yeah, let's see our kid though. Okay class one. Let's go watch the baby sleep.
Speaker 3:It's like it's cheap entertainment, man, but it makes you feel really good.
Speaker 2:Wow, we did that I know that I made this. It's a miracle, it's really.
Speaker 3:You made it together with your partner, and that's what a bonding experience, you know, that sense of family that I never had growing up. I had then and I have now, even more so, with my family now.
Speaker 2:When you were having your oldest daughter. What was that like when you first found out you were going to have?
Speaker 3:a child. Well, so when I met her mom we fell in love. She was living in Portland. She moved to San Francisco to live with me and we were in so, so in love that we're like that's nice, he's birth control, let's have a baby. You know, I mean money, but we had love and sex and that seemed like a good thing. And then, you know, like three, four months into that we're like maybe we got to taper that back a little bit, you know, because the pink clouds kind of wearing off, as it does with relationships, and by that time it's too late. We had a baby on the way and we moved to Portland because we're living in San Francisco and public schools were not good there and they were in Portland and we can eventually buy a house in Portland.
Speaker 3:So I agreed to move to Portland. They had a great music scene going on, so we moved up there and around December of 91, my daughter was born in June of 92. And that's I was pretty excited about it. When she was born I remember being, you know, I was there and then I left. After the baby was born I went home to go get some stuff, because we're in a suite, and I said I could spend the night with my wife and I went home to get some clothes for her and for me and I felt postpartum depression. I felt like this weight literal weight on me because I'm sitting there going and I don't know what the hell I'm doing. I can barely take care of myself.
Speaker 3:I have to take care of Tywin and.
Speaker 3:I'm just sitting there and it was like a God shot where all of a sudden, I saw this light in my room and this lightness just being. I just realized I always put her first and it's going to be okay. That's it. Even if I have to work and work three jobs and play in a band, I put her first. That's my driving impetus, is her that she's okay and that's it's never failed me. To be honest with you, it's just priorities by prioritizing and being tenacious, because when people go, do you have any words of wisdom for people? I go me no.
Speaker 3:But if I had to give you something, I'd just if you want something really bad, don't give up, because you might not get it anyways, but you definitely might get it if you give up and there's always someone right behind you waiting like excuse me, thank you. They want it more than you and you have to want it more than anybody else. And I've never done anything. I'm scrupulous, business-wise, but I'm just. I drive myself hard and I drive people around me really hard, not so much anymore, but in the years that mattered I did. But let me get back to the father of mine thing because I think it's important.
Speaker 3:So basically, me and my wife at the time were watching my dog sleep and it just came to me as like thinking of my dad. I was like, how does a guy walk away from this? I mean, how do you do that? How do you see this and walk away from this? How do you do this? And my wife was going to bed and I'm like I'm going to go work.
Speaker 3:I had an office and I had an acoustic guitar on there and I go on there and write. I just started writing words and just building a story and playing a couple of riffs came up, a riff for Father of Mine and by the morning I had pretty much all of it done and a couple of days later, I'd say about two weeks later, I had the song done and I was down in California at the Capitol building because we were song to capital and my A&R guy knew to not like push me on songs because I didn't do demos and I was basically I was going to give you the record and you're going to put it out. That's how it's going to go and which is really arrogant hindsight. But I'd probably do the same thing today.
Speaker 3:But, he's like you got anything you can tell me about or play me something or something. And he had a guitar in his office like that. You want to hear a little bit of the song? It was yeah, so I start playing it and I play the whole song Stoic. They don't show emotion, but he's sitting there and he's wiping his eyes behind his glasses and out in the front room where the secretaries or assistants have their desk. I hear sobbing, I hear the sound and we walk out and there's four young women sitting on a desk hugging each other, weeping, weeping.
Speaker 3:That is the best I've ever heard, just crying and my A&R guy goes well, I don't know if it's the same, but it's going on the record. I'm like, okay, and when it was recorded and mixed and everything, and he pushed for it to be a single, even though I didn't know it was gonna happen with it, Really.
Speaker 3:We had a couple of hits before it. Everything. Everyone was the number one hit that alternative did. I'll buy you a new life. The number one hit that alternative did okay at pop, but Father of Mine was the one that brought it home on that record.
Speaker 2:What was it like when you found out how popular that song actually became?
Speaker 3:It was weird I would be places and I had already gotten that from Santa Monica and from the other singles People recognizing me from videos and talking to me. Father of. Mine would bring people to meet and they would just tell me their story. I'd be in the supermarket and people would just start telling me their story.
Speaker 2:What was that like?
Speaker 3:It was intense. It was intense. It wasn't really. It wasn't really looking for that or set up for that. I'm not a therapist, but I have been through enough therapy. I probably could be, but I just. One of the things that I really loved about it is I got people from every race, every psychological makeup, every financial background, it didn't matter. It was really, really interesting when people would come up and tell me their stories. It made an impact on me, for sure.
Speaker 2:I was at Starbucks this morning. What happened?
Speaker 3:I had to go in. I used to go through the drive-thru. I went in and this guy's next to me and he's talking and I go. Do you know? Who that is. And she's like, yeah, that's Art, cause I come in every day. These young girls don't know Everclear they're like in their twenties.
Speaker 3:And he's like, no, you don't understand and he goes he's a rock star. And then he's like you're a rock star, father of mine. That song changed my life, it changed everything and I'm like and you need to lower your voice, he was yelling, he was yelling, he was excited. I guess. So I called my wife. She's like you're just troublemaker, you're just causing trouble, man Ta-da.
Speaker 2:Well, you would be surprised. My stepson he's 20. He loves you guys and a lot of his friends. Do you know what's funny?
Speaker 3:You know, what's funny, jimmy, is that I'd say at least a quarter, if not more, of the people kids, people coming to see us are kids the rock and the age late teens, early twenties, mid twenties who were either not even born when we had our first records come out, or babies, and I think there's a lot of people really hungry for rock and roll. A lot of nineties bands are doing well because of it, because I think that was the last era of guitar-based rock and roll that was on the radio, that was really popular. I mean bands like us we played Saturday Night Live.
Speaker 3:We're not putting rock and roll bands on Saturday Night Live anymore. It's just not happening and it was a different era. And I've said it many times Most of us that were making music in the nineties grew up in the seventies when it was cheap trick Aerosmith, led Zeppelin, bands like that, guitar bands were on the radio. So that's kind of what we grew up with. And then it went through hip hop and punk rock and all that stuff. So I think we brought something new to it because of it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think kids are longing for something without auto-tune.
Speaker 3:Thank you, yes, without auto-tune and without tracks. Some talent, just something. And that was like the kids they talked about don't want metal, they want rock and roll. They want guitars and they want voices and they want passion. Yeah, and I get it. I still do. I will be a 90-year-old guy with bad hearing, just pissing off everybody at the old folks home, just cranking it up. Hopefully they'll have a punk rock. Old folks home, punk rock.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I did want to ask you so when Father of Mine came out and it's this huge hit and everybody's, everybody's talking. It's like coming at you wherever you are and obviously still this morning people are talking to you about it. So did your. Did your father ever talk to you about that song that you wrote? Because obviously he knows that was about.
Speaker 3:Yeah, he did. I remember he reached out to me and that song had come out and he was like hey, boy, you know you had this bro greek accent. And he'd be like I, you know, you want a song about me? Yeah, I hope you did me proud, I go. Well, dad, you haven't heard it. I was no, I haven't heard it. Yeah, well, it's honest. It's honest and true. And you didn't say much after that because I don't think he wanted to hear honest and true, and then I didn't hear anything about it.
Speaker 3:After that we talked sporadically my sister's been pushing to talk to my dad and one of my sisters who I never really got along with very well after I grew up. She just she was very over here politically and religiously and I wasn't. And she but someone asked her about like did your brother like is he romanticizing that? Like did he make a lot of that stuff up and about your dad? My sister's like no, arthur, they call me Arthur. Arthur was being nice, he was being kind. If I had written the song it wouldn't been that nice so yeah, it's truthful right because they were older and they saw a lot more of what was going on than I did.
Speaker 3:It's like him just walking, him just walking by and smacking my mom or cheating on my mom with her best friends and people like neighbors and stuff like that. You know, yeah, my dad made a lot of bad choices, man. I have compassion for him because I everybody makes bad choices and I've been the king of bad making bad choices. I never made those kind of choices when it comes to my kids, but he did and he was you know he was abandoned as a kid.
Speaker 3:His dad and mom came over on the boat after World War One in 1919 and my grandfather met my grandmother. She was like 12 or 13 or 14, something like that, which back then for Greek people you know people from the old country perfect, let's get married yeah and worked out a deal with her parents, kind of an arranged marriage, forced marriage moved to New Hampshire, had two children and she was pregnant again and she ran off the fuller brush salesman, the door-to-door salesman, through story oh my gosh and making 24 right wow
Speaker 3:to get away from. That man and my grandfather typical the men in my family took his sons, put him on a boat with an, with a nurse, with a nanny, sent him to Greece and that was he was done. Sent him to Greece to be raised by his mom because his dad was off Rome in the countryside, having, you know, illegitimate children with other people. I come from a long line of of men that adhered to that cycle. I am the first one that broke that cycle of of not why do you think you were able to do that?
Speaker 3:because my mother raised me flat out, my mom my mom never really bad talked my dad like a lot of women would. In that situation of the abuse and the abandonment and not paying child support and all that my mom did, but it's very passive, aggressive. She'd be like boy. A real man doesn't leave his children and moved to the other side of the country and raise someone else's children. A real man realizes that people grow apart and takes, gets divorced and moves down the street and raises his children with his ex-wife. And I've always believed that. I still believe that to this day.
Speaker 3:You can't work it out. Don't put it on your kids, man, put your kids first and raise them up, and I see a lot of people doing it. One of the unfortunate things about the fact that there's a divorce rate is what it is is that we've learned to be better at at divorce and raising children in divorce and I see a lot of families, mixed families, remarrying, having children. You have stepchildren. My wife has a stepdaughter. It isn't easy, it's hard, it's really hard especially, you know, sometimes you get along with your stepchild's mother or father, sometimes you don't. It's not, you know, but you got to try, you got to do the work. You got it. You got to grind it out and be there and be positive and be and find love, be able to love it. You don't have to like, you have to love it that's my take because we say that.
Speaker 3:You know, and recovery is like look, man, if you're my sober brother or sister, I'm gonna love you. I don't necessarily have to like you, but I have to be there for you as a sober person and that's something that's really important, I think, and you know, just doing the steps and doing recovery and and working it every day. I see my wife, I see now it's changed me because I was sober before I met her, but just how I be involved with it and she's involved in in different programs around that as well, and she's not, she's not an addict, she barely have one drink, you know she's a cheat.
Speaker 3:For sure I gotta hit that window, right, that one window. But uh, we just have such a great relationship right now, and only relationships with everybody, with people I've known for years, and people like I'm just meaning are better because of my sobriety and my relationship with my higher power.
Speaker 2:For me, if someone's listening to this and they are a younger girl or boy either one and they're having struggles because they're from a broken family, they have an absentee dad and they're really struggling right now. Like what would you say to them?
Speaker 3:I urge them 100% get into therapy and find a great therapist, whether it doesn't matter how much money you have. There's programs everywhere. Um, and don't settle for someone that doesn't get you or you don't get them. There's plenty of people out there, but if you can find that relationship of a therapist or a mentor or a coach, it's just wonderful what we can all get back. I'm I'm a certified life coach.
Speaker 2:I'm are you?
Speaker 3:yeah, and I'm just starting to to build clientele now. I've been waiting because we've been touring so much and I've got this book deal and just I get a lot going on, I got them. I said now, now they tell me, I got pancreatis or something, something like that. It's just I mean getting old sucks. It just sucks because I feel 15, don't you feel like a kid?
Speaker 2:inside I. It is strange, as you get older.
Speaker 3:I just heard 40 and I was like, I feel, 20 well, you look great, but I'm looking at me and I'm like who the hell is this guy? Who's that guy? That's not that good looking long guy, that's like that guy, you know. But I still feel like the kid and I think, I think that that's more important than anything, because even this is gonna break down and go away. Beauty is gonna go away. Beauty becomes more of a, you know, internal thing. But uh, man, you know, just I, I'm just grateful. I have a lot of gratitude in my life right now and, like I said, I can be grateful to COVID, because COVID brought a bunch of horrible stuff, but it also brought good stuff, and I'm focusing on the good stuff from the lockdowns and just Zoom, zoom, it's just Zoom. Meetings for recovery has been a huge part for millions of people and just connecting with people.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean, we weren't doing interviews on Zoom before COVID. No probably every interview you do is on Zoom.
Speaker 2:Now everything is on Zoom.
Speaker 3:I'm on Zoom at least once a day. Yeah, do interviews today. I got like the interviews are really starting to kick in the tour and they haven't kicked in for the album yet because we haven't really released a press release for the album. We've just kind of teased it. But we have a live album coming out right at the same time as the tour.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so let's before I let you go, let's talk about that tour.
Speaker 3:Okay.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So when does it, when does it begin and what? Cities are going to be in.
Speaker 3:Well, it kicks off September 6th. A lot of major markets and a lot of first year markets as well. It's 30 dates. It's going to start in the Midwest, in Lexington, Kentucky, and it's going to end out here in California, in the desert, at a place called Papian Harriots, where Paul McCartney's play and everybody. It's like a very hip place to play and it'd be our third year in a row ending the tour out there. Round up. It's about two hours from my house, so my family will get a ride out there. Someone my wife's a ant lives in Palm Springs, which is right next to it. Coachella is out there. You know the whole thing. But yeah, we've got a lot of great dates. It's all online.
Speaker 3:Go to everclearmusiconlinecom and it's just we're touring with the Atari's great band from Central California and some hits back in the the aughts, I guess you'd call it, and another band from that era from Nashville excuse me called the Pink Spiders. It's going to be a fun, fun rock and roll.
Speaker 2:I can't wait. We're already getting our tickets, for you'll be at Fillmore in Silver Spring on the 13th of September, so we will be seeing you then.
Speaker 3:It's just the sun come. Oh yeah, awesome, I would be a meeting person.
Speaker 2:Yeah, me too, no. So I'll make sure that everything's in the show notes as well for everyone, so you can just click really quickly to purchase your tickets for the tour. And before I let you go, is there anything that we haven't covered that you'd want anyone to know?
Speaker 3:Just keep your eye, everybody keep your eye out for our first real big live record. It's going to be a double live vinyl record. It'll be digital as well. There's going to be a video or it'll have two. It's called Strangely Enough, everclear Live at the Whiskey of GoGo, at the legendary Whiskey of GoGo we played last year and record is dead and it's just, it sounds really great. I worked, we worked really hard on that and it just it's raw and kind of sloppy, but still very rock and roll and still tight.
Speaker 2:I'm excited.
Speaker 3:Okay.
Speaker 2:I can't let you go without asking this, or else my husband will like die what he needs to know. What was your favorite song that you ever have written?
Speaker 3:I don't know if there's one, but if I haven't choose one.
Speaker 2:It's a hard question, I'm sure.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's like which, which child do you like?
Speaker 2:That's what I was thinking, go ahead. Tell me yours, I'll take mine, I like, depends on the hour.
Speaker 3:Everybody has their favorite child.
Speaker 2:Come on, I'm a two year old, so it depends on the hour.
Speaker 3:Sometimes the minute Right, but they're throwing things at you. There's a song I mean. I'm very grateful to my hits. I'm very grateful to Santa Monica. They bought me houses and a couple of divorces. I'm very grateful for that, because I wouldn't be where I'm at now without all that bad stuff, and I'm just grateful for it.
Speaker 3:So, internally grateful. But there's a song called learning how to smile. That's on our fourth record, songs from America movie, volume one learning how to smile. I think that's pretty great song and a song I did for my solo record, a song called hot water test, which is about my MS, my multiple sclerosis, which I was diagnosed with in 2016. But the song came out in 2019. And I hadn't been public about it. Family friends knew about it. I talked to people about it. I wasn't hiding it. I wasn't talking about it because I needed to process it. I needed to process what it, what it was and what it was doing to me, and I think that song came out pretty honest and pretty good.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you so much for sharing everything about your life and what you have going on now when you're upcoming tour, and you're one of the most positive people I've met and it's been a really yeah, it's been wonderful and quite an honor to have this conversation with you. So I appreciate you taking out the time to talk to me.
Speaker 3:You're very welcome. It's wonderful talking to you and thank you for calling me positive. People tell me that all the time I'm like man. I don't know when that happened. It obviously happened in the last few years and I'm great for that, because before that it was kind of a dark cloud walking around. But I'm grateful and I think that comes through. So thank you very much.
Speaker 2:All right, well, thank you, art, and have a great rest of the day. Bye, bye. If you liked this episode, please make sure to rate and review our podcast. That is how more people learn about the Truman Charities podcast and our organization. And to make sure you don't miss any of our future episodes, subscribe, subscribe, subscribe. If you'd like to follow Truman Charities, you can follow us on Facebook at Truman Charities, instagram at Jamie underscore Truman Charities, and check out our website, truman Charities dot com.