The Hustle Begins - Getting Over Starting Over

American Hustle is a show for men who refuse to settle. Hosted by Austin Moody — a country artist turned blue-collar CEO, father, and fighter — this podcast is a raw, honest look at what it takes to rebuild your life when the world knocks you flat.

From growing up on a small farm in East Tennessee to chasing a music dream in Nashville...to losing everything in 2020 and starting over with a pressure washer and an old pickup…

Austin has lived every chapter of the American comeback story — and now he’s bringing those lessons forward.

This podcast is for the builders, the operators, the dreamers — the men who don’t care about applause; they care about results.

Expect conversations with blue-collar millionaires, entrepreneurs who built empires with their bare hands, military leaders who’ve lived under pressure most men can’t imagine, and artists who never quit even when the world told them to.

And expect real talk — not clichés. The kind that kicks you in the ass when you need it, and puts an arm around your shoulder when you’re standing in the wreckage trying to figure out your next move.

Every episode is built around one mission: to help men take responsibility, build something real, and fight for a life worth handing down.

If you're starting over… If you're building from scratch… If you’ve still got fire left in you but need direction… You're in the right place.

Stay humble. Stay hungry. Stay free. Welcome to the brotherhood. Welcome to American Hustle.

Credits:

Host: Austin Moody 

Produced by: Austin Moody 

Creative Direction: Brandon Carswell 

Editing & Audio: Brad Wygle 

Artwork: Whitney Dean, Mitch Wallis & Three Crow Creative 

Music: Produced by Austin Moody, Mixed by Rodney Mills

Recorded in: Nashville, Tennessee

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:08

You know, life doesn't hand you a roadmap. You just get a few scars, a couple chances, and the will to try again. Welcome to the American Hustle. I'm Austin Moody, a country artist turned blue-collar businessman, a dad, and a man who's had to start over more times than I can count. This show is for men who refuse to settle. The ones building something real, even when no one's clapping for it. Today's episode is called The Hustle Begins, Gettin' Over, Startin' Over. Whether you're driving to a job site, sitting in the garage trying to figure life out, or just looking for a little fire to get you back up again, you're in the right place. Let's get to it. I figured on this first one, I would just give you a brief summary of who I am, where I come from, a little bit of my history and what I've done with my life and how I've gone from East Tennessee in a small town, got to Nashville, spent over a decade as a full-time musician in country music, and then had a hard stop in 2020 and had to start over. And started a pressure washing business from scratch, turned it into one of the most successful pressure washing companies in Nashville, and how we got to creating the American Hustle Podcast. So welcome. This one's called Getting Over Starting Over. Because today I want to talk to you about starting over. If you've ever felt like you've had to start over and didn't know how, well rather you're in the right place. I grew up in Kingsport, Tennessee, just a farming blue-collar kind of life. My dad worked at the same chemical plant for 44 years, hired in at 19, and 44 years later, he retired. During that time, he ran a railroad, worked heavy equipment, pressure washed inside of bowlers. The guy is tough as nails. His nickname in the plant was the Intimidator. He was all about hard work and just showing up. That's what he did. He showed up, he went to work, he provided, and he came home and farmed. Now my mom, on the other hand, she was the dreamer. She encouraged everything I wanted to do. She always said, You can do anything, Austin. Can't's not in your vocabulary. I used to get so annoyed at her, she probably said it a million times when I said, I can't do this or whatever. Can't isn't in your vocabulary, Austin. My parents actually got a divorce when I was 13. And if any of you come from a divorced family, you know once that happens, you live in two different worlds. One side of my world was hard work, be steady, graduate, high school, get a job, stick with it, go to work every day, come home, and do it for the rest of your life and retire. There's nothing wrong with that. I'm proud of my dad for what he accomplished in his life. But he also grew up in a different time frame. I think you could go in and do that and walk away sitting pretty. It's just a little bit different now. And we'll talk about that later. But my mom, she was the one that pushed me to dream big and go after whatever I want, even if it didn't make sense. So that's why I'm a little mix of both, I guess. I'm a dreamer who works his ass off. I caught the music bug when I was like six, five or six, I guess. I begged my parents for a banjo. I fell in love with that instrument early on, and there's the old joke that says if you grow up in East Tennessee, you're issued a banjo at birth. But I got mine at seven years old, and they had to endure the years of me figuring out how to play it and practicing, and eventually got the hang of it, started a band, played all over the region in East Tennessee, and and churches and homecomings and hoedowns, the whole the whole deal. I was also a competition clogger. That's something else I wanted to do that my mom got me in, and lo and behold, actually competed as a competition clogger in the AAU Olympics in Detroit, Michigan, the first year they allowed it as a sport. Now I was a guy on an all-girl team. Yeah. And and two, I clogged in front of two presidents. I clogged in front of Clinton and George W. Bush. Side note, but yeah, there you go. I'm the clogging farm boy that also had a pet possum. So my my country music pedigree was just kind of handed to me. Uh whenever anybody would ask me, like, are you really country or whatever? And it's like, I just could show them a picture of my pet possum and go, Well, what do you think? So uh what's funny is is like even though I had the music bug, I never thought about doing it for a living. I I didn't really think people actually did that for a living. It just never did enter my mind like that I would ever be able to do that. I just love music. I started writing songs at 13 out of the love for the for the craft. In high school, I was in ROTC. That's for those of you who don't know, that's uh something called Reserve Officer Training Corps. And I fell right into that. Uh uh and and again, why I wanted to join ROTC was I found out that if you stuck with it, your junior year, you would have the opportunity to solo a plane by yourself. And since I was a little kid, the only things I ever wanted to do was fly planes and sing country music. I remember swinging in the backyard on my swing set and looking up at the sky, and I have like this I don't I don't remember everything, you know, but I think some moments in your life you just remember, and that's all I wanted to do. My little girlfriend in elementary school used to joke to her parents and say, Austin's gonna be a country music star, and I'm gonna be a stay-at-home mom. Like I knew what I wanted to do. There was no question. But as you age, that stuff just becomes uh a dream and not so much reality. So my plans were to join the Air Force, you know, get through ROTC, enlist, and hopefully get an opportunity to go to flight school in the Air Force and do that as a career. Until my junior year of high school, and I had an opportunity to go to a Marty Stewart show. I uh met Marty, handed him a homemade CD, and before I knew it, I was sitting down with him and his band playing a few songs. Two weeks later, I was in Nashville writing songs with him, and that was my junior year of high school. After commuting back and forth to Nashville, I kind of was like, man, do I join the Air Force or do I see where this opportunity takes me? Because then my eyes were open. I was like, okay, what am I gonna regret more? Not knowing where this road goes with music or joining the Air Force. So I came to the conclusion that I would always regret never knowing where that opportunity took me, and said, you know, if it doesn't work out in three or four years, the Air Force will always be there. So I actually finished my pilot training, got my private pilots' license before I graduated high school, and two weeks later I was off to Nashville, went to audio engineering school, and after spending a bunch of money to figure out I didn't want to do that for a living, I started playing clubs because that's why I wanted to come to Nashville. I wanted to play, I wanted to write songs. And so I started playing clubs, and before you knew it, I uh landed my first publishing deal for writing songs, signed a record deal, and I was doing the thing, man. I was pursuing my dream for long. I was making a real decent living at it. And just to make a living in the music business, you've already won. I I don't think I realized how good I had at the t at the time, and and uh but it was it was awesome. Then 2020 came. 2020, right before that, I had just recorded a record with two guys, two of my heroes, Keith Steagall and Mac Mackinelli, and we recorded this record down in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. If you don't know Muscle Shoals, Alabama, and you're a music fan, you shouldn't know Muscle Shoals, Alabama. You gotta go check out the documentary on on Prime. It's called Muscle Shoals. You won't believe how much music was recorded there. Uh it was an awesome experience. This was, you know, this was probably, well, this was like a decade into to my music career. Um, and this was the record, y'all. This was the one I was putting everything in on. I'd actually gotten out of a record deal, and so I had uh had self-funded this record myself, actually taking out a a line of credit uh to go do this record. And when we started to go and take it around to record labels to check interest to picking up the record, that was the second week of February 2020. And you know what happened after that? 2020 shutdown, COVID. Oh, everybody's off work two weeks, a month, six weeks. Turned into six months. And it was gone. It was over. And it wasn't just for me, it was for everyone in the music industry, everyone in the in the world. But for the music industry, I mean it shut down our life. We couldn't tour. I lost 130 shows overnight. Uh, that was my bread and butter income. And buddy, I was depressed about it. Uh I guess I hit a all-time low with that. You know, and I had I had just written a song, actually, that was on this record, uh, called Gettin' Over, Startin' Over, and I wrote it with Mac Mackinelli. You know, I I I guess I didn't really know how real that song would get, but by the end of the year, that song was my life. Pandemic hit, no shows, no income, and I went from a full-time musician to broke overnight. I sat there and wondered, I was like, well, what now? And just trying to figure out how to pick myself back up. So I reverted back to like thinking, how can I continue to make a living and still pursue this music thing? And I remember my dad growing up, like, he he would always be doing some kind of side hustles, whether it was backhoe work or sewing people's yards, and he he would actually go out and pressure wash decks and driveways and seal driveways. And so I had my old pickup truck that I had in high school and had a pressure washer, so I started going out pressure washing on the side. And immediately my my branding brain went into uh, well, what am I gonna call this thing? And I just kind of joked and called it the pressure washing dude. And so uh in 2020, I actually made more money than I had ever made to date. And the following year I was kind of like, well, music's still not back, no one's booking shows. So I went full on into the business. Um I built a pressure washing rig, kind of not really knowing anything about the industry. Um, but I knew just from my experience in the music world, people hear with their eyes. Just like if somebody gets off a bus, a previous bus or a private jet, they can be a nobody. But the fans or the average person out there is gonna think they are somebody. Again, people hear with their eyes. If it looks successful, it is successful. And so I built this hot rod rig, man, and I didn't know a quarter of what I know now about the industry. I just knew, hey, I've got to look the part, it's gotta look like I know what I'm doing if I'm gonna go out here and start this business. So that's what I did. I started pressure washing, and I was still pretty depressed about the whole deal. But I was paying my bills and I applied lessons that I learned in the music business like communicating with customers, just like I would communicate with an audience on stage. If you don't believe it, the stuff you're singing, the songs you're singing, if you don't believe the stuff you're doing, then they're not gonna believe it either. Uh branding and image, I'd done that for years in the music industry. Uh I knew how to brand, how to create logos, who to call. The guy that designed the pressure washing dude logo actually went to high school with him, but he worked for Big Loud Records. And Big Loud Records is how you know about Morgan Wallen and Florida, Georgia line, and all these other massive acts. And so I just used my connections in the business and the creative world to help brand my business and applied everything I've learned in the music business to selling pressure washing and window cleaning. I came about it from a completely different place. Uh four years later, it turned into one of the most successful pressure washing companies in Nashville, and we're still growing. It's been such a blessing in my life to be able to build something on my own and still be able to pursue my passion. It's not necessarily I'm chasing a dream now. It's that, hey, I've got a legitimate, great income that I'm able to provide for my daughter, myself, take care of my family, and I'm also able to go play shows. I've got this this cool, really badass band I'm in called the Neon High. We go out anytime that shows come up and play. I get to do the thing on my terms. So that's where we're at. You know, it's like writing songs taught me how to listen. Performance taught me how to connect and sell. Touring taught me rejection. Being in the music industry, if you want to learn about rejection, come and try to try to sneak your way into the music industry and you'll learn a lot about rejection, trust me. Production, my years in audio engineering school that I I didn't really care for, taught me a lot about production and professionalism and presenting to the client. Turns out music was my training to be a business owner. And I would encourage any musician or anybody chasing a dream. I know musicians, so if I had it to do over, if I was moving to Nashville tomorrow at 18 years old, I would have moved to Nashville and started a window cleaning business to start something that's cheap to get into, and I would have been sitting a lot better than I am now. Uh and again, it's about pursuing your passions on your own terms. So here we are. I was a little long-winded, but that's a brief kind of history of how I got here. And now, you know, I've got an extremely successful blue-collar home service business that's allowing me to pursue my passion in music. And uh it's given me freedom to do the things I want to do and be there for my daughter, and hopefully build something that she can inherit one day and be a great provider at the same time as you know, her getting to see me dreaming and persevering through through everything. When you're knocked down, when you feel like you've lost everything and you can get back up, that's what I want my daughter to see. So now here's the American hustle. Now that I'm here, I want to I want to give back and also have some real thought to you guys and real encouragement. The American Hustle movement, it's for men that's either starting over, chasing dreams, even if you're a blue-collar guy that's necessarily doesn't have the the branding creative world side, whatever, I want to share those thoughts and where you can learn. And from my years in the music business and how I've applied what I've learned to my blue-collar trade business. I've I've taken a boring pressure washing business and turned it into a fun, cool, branded, uh, great culture because of my past. Um the American Hustle is is really like a brotherhood movement. I'm really excited about it. Uh I'm gonna bring in some of the relationships from business to successful musicians to military guys I've met over the years, playing military bases and DOD bases, and uh the leadership that I've that I've stayed in contact with. They're gonna come on the show. We're gonna bring in CEOs, we're gonna bring in guys who have started billion-dollar businesses from nothing, and it's gonna be really exciting. I hope we can we can learn together and I can help you guys out there build what you're trying to build. So if you're starting over, I've been you. You can build a real life. If I can do it, anybody can do it. Like I've told other people, if a banjo picking, clogging, possumoning kid from Kingsport, Tennessee can figure his thing out, so can you. Well, that's it for the first episode of American Hustle. If there's one thing I've learned, it's this starting over ain't failure. It's just proof you still got some fight left in you. If this story hit home, share it with a brother who needs to hear it. Subscribe wherever you listen, and head over to AmericanHustle.com to join the movement. Next week, I'm sitting down with my buddy Marty B, a Texas-born restaurant mogul who built his dream from the ground up. We're gonna talk about leadership, hard work, and what it really takes to build something at last. Until then, stay humble, stay hungry, and stay free.