The Long Game: Jeff King on Staying Elite and Building Freedom

In this episode of American Hustle, Austin Moody sits down with legendary Nashville guitarist Jeff King for a conversation that goes far beyond music.

Jeff came out of the mountains of East Tennessee and carved out one of the most respected careers in the industry — staying in demand for decades in a business where most people burn out fast. But what sets Jeff apart isn’t just mastery of his craft. It’s how he played the long game.

We talk about discipline, staying elite, and why Jeff chose to build real financial freedom through real estate instead of relying solely on the music industry. Jeff also shares his perspective on how AI and technology are changing music — and what skills will still matter in the years ahead.

This episode is for musicians, entrepreneurs, blue-collar builders, and anyone who wants to master their craft, diversify their income, and build a life on their own terms.

No hype. No shortcuts. Just real hustle.

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Credits

Host: Austin Moody

Guest: Jeff King

Videography & Edit: Mitch Wallis 

Graphic Design: Zack Knudsen

Executive Production: Mid Century Western

Creative Direction: Brandon Carswell

Recorded On-Location in Nashville 

Transcript

East Tennessee Roots

Austin Moody 0:07

Welcome back to American Hosting House. Today's Jesse, a dear friend of mine Jeff King. He came out of East Tennessee with a guitar, a backbone, and a worked ethic that never missed a day. He played with the biggest names in music, but what I respect most is how he built a life outside of the spotlight. Real estate, discipline, long-term thinking. That's the real hustle. Today we're talking mastery, money, and the future of music in an AI world. I'm Austin Moody, and this is American Hustle. So Jeff's played on hundreds of my hits.

Jeff King 0:41

Well, you never know they're hits until you get out there. They're all hits.

Austin Moody 0:45

Yeah. So I wanna how I like to start this show is I want to take people back. So we're both East Tennessee boys. I'm a little farther east, Kingsport, but you were born in Townsend. I was born in Arlington, Virginia. Okay.

Jeff King 1:01

Yeah. And then uh at the age of one, we moved to Maryville, Tennessee. My dad is from the town of Townsend. Okay. And I think he was born at the hospital in Maryville. And anyway, so we lived in Maryville for maybe six years. Then we moved to Townsend and lived beside my grandmother. While my folks were building their house out in the valley, so then then we moved out in the valley when I was about nine, maybe. Okay. So been up there a long time.

Austin Moody 1:37

Yeah.

Jeff King 1:37

I told him.

Austin Moody 1:38

So what what what what was it like growing up there? Because at that it was super small.

Jeff King 1:45

Super rural, really. There was a caution light. And and a few little gas station grocery stores. And a school. If you want to go to the doctor or the hospital, you had to go to Maribel, which was maybe 20 minutes, 25 minutes away. But Townsend's kind of back in the mountains right before you go into this Great Smoky Mountains National Park. So in the summertime, Townsend would be swimming with tourists. And in this in the wintertime, there would be, I think at in in that, at that time, probably 400 people, maybe. My friend and I used to leave basketball practice in uh, you know, whenever like November or whatever, and the and and we'd come down the middle, we'd walk down the middle of the highway on the center line, all the way to his house was you know, half a mile away, and never see a car. So a small town.

First Guitar And DIY Recording

Austin Moody 2:44

Yeah. But yeah, that I grew up in, as you know, in Kingsport, but spent a lot of time Kingsport was a you know, it was it was a decent little small town. But I I part of my childhood I grew up in Yuma, Virginia, down across the line, Nicholsville. My stepdad had a place in Nicholsville, and Nicholsville was sounds a lot like Townsend for You. I mean that was like, you know, uh some parts parts of my life I sound like the 1960s. Cause you still had barbershops with picking parlors, and you could hitch a ride on a two-lane road and get a ride into town and try to go in and buy get away with buying some cigars or so we had and there was there was two competing gas stations and one restaurant called Teddy's. So what w you know the guy guys and gals listening to this, a lot of them are are, you know, hustlers, blue-collar entrepreneurs, dreamers, fathers, and you and you've done every every bit of it. What was was there a moment when you're a kid back in East Tennessee where you you knew you wanted to do do music? Back back before logic kicked in. Yeah, and you were a kid.

Jeff King 4:25

Well, yes, I think so I got my first guitar when I was about ten, found it at my grandmother's house in the back of a closet. Uh and it was not a great playing guitar, but it was my uncle's guitar, and he had one, but I don't think he ever played it. And so I remember sitting there listening to the strings, going, man, that's cool the way those ring. I didn't know how to tune it or anything, just listened like, wow, it was just the sound. And for me, my aunt had just bought a 45 Dobie Gray had put out Driftaway. And I remember sitting there at her, it was probably a mono, you know, a little record player, and I just remember going, this is the coolest thing I've ever heard. How does how do you do this? How do you how do you where does this come from? You know, I had no idea how you go in a studio and record and do multiple passes of stuff to make the guitars cool like they were on that record. And um I just remember thinking it was overwhelming how cool it was. And then um I started getting I had a tape recorder, somebody else had a tape recorder, so I used both tape recorders, and I started playing things on the guitar, which I still had no idea what a chord was or what a tuning. So I just play the little notes on one and I'd play it back, and I'd add another one. So I was doing my West Virginia, this was in West Virginia where my mom's from. I was doing my own West Virginia, you know, multi-tracking from cassette to cassette. And uh it was fun. I was just thinking, man, this is this is so awesome.

Austin Moody 6:08

The world is your oyster. So was there somebody that in your family played?

From College Bands To Nashville Auditions

Jeff King 6:16

My grandmother played piano in church, and my mom played some piano in church. My dad had a juice harp, you know, that you that's the sound of the country. And I just wanted to play guitar. I don't know. And I I took lessons from a local guy, his name was Ronnie Sullivan. He was in in the Sullivan, Sullivan family had a band. There was a bunch of them. So there were drummer, bass player, electric player, and my friend Ronnie played acoustic and sang great. And I think there was a sister that sang, and started hanging out with them just a little bit as a teenager, but in my town there were no bars or anything. So I think on Sunday evenings they used to get together at somebody's house under a tree and play bluegrass. And I thought that was cool, but it still wasn't what I wanted to was focused on hearing other things. And and then I got, you know, started getting interested in the Marshall Tucker band and some of the some of the Southern rock stuff, and then the Eagles came out with Hotel California, and I guess that was maybe 70, late 70s. But I'm not sure what record, I'm confused about the records, but there was a song, I can't tell you why. You remember that? You you'd know it if you heard it, but anyways, very soulful. And by this point, I had a really bad guitar and a my parents had bought me a Fender Pro reverb and uh and some kind of electric guitar. Um so I remember learning, figuring out the solos on some of that stuff, going, wow, it's so cool. Playing along with it. So I was sort of in the Eagles for a while. And then in my mind, but that just made everything a little more intense. And my want to learn how to do this got stronger. But at the time, there was no YouTube, there was no way to slow things down other than slow it down on your record player and change the key and try to figure out what you're doing. And and then I realized there's really nowhere to learn this other than exactly where I was learning it from, or taking lessons from somebody. And there was no else. My friend Ronnie knew how to play chords and maybe a little bit of picking, but not the kind of stuff that I was had heard that I wanted to be involved in. So I just sort of wondered, you gotta sit down and do this yourself. No way, no, it's not coming from anywhere. Yeah. So I just think how much better I would be now if I had all this stuff that we have now, all the YouTube, and you can slow stamps down on YouTube. Six Yeah.

Austin Moody 9:10

Well, I don't know. And That's interesting. I never thought of that, because in East Tennessee, there's a lot of guys that teach bluegrass.

Jeff King 9:18

Yeah.

Austin Moody 9:18

You know, you can find a banjo instructor.

Jeff King 9:20

Oh, yeah.

Austin Moody 9:21

And find a, you know, somebody to teach you how to how to uh flat pit.

Jeff King 9:26

Yeah.

Austin Moody 9:26

A doghouse. Yeah. Bass and I've never thought about that before because I never I always wanted to play bluegrass. Once my mind wasn't opened up and to everything when I was younger, it was bluegrass gospel and country. That's all that was on the radio in my house, you know.

Jeff King 9:45

I didn't know about bluegrass, really. I it just and I didn't know much about gospel other than what happened at church. You know, there were a few quartets that used to come in, and uh my first band gig was with in a quartet that my mom sang in at church, and I was using this little bitty tiny fender down here, this little vibrochamp, it's got an eight-inch speaker, and somehow it was always too loud. And I think it was always too loud because I was really bad. And they just turned down this little bad gig. It's you really loud out front. Heard that a little bit, yeah. So you learn about all this stuff in the way, you know. It's like bumper cars.

Austin Moody 10:27

So you know, being a kid, being playing church and all that stuff. Were you were you dreaming about you know, going, how can I figure out how to do this for a living and transition, and when did that when did logic or whatever kick into where it's like, well, you know, I need to go I cause I know you went to ETSU to become an architect, right? I was on my weight. And so was there a moment you're you're like, I want to do this? 'Cause for me I played in bands, you know, loved music, was dedicated to it, but I never thought about people making a living doing it. You know. And I mean I had I had no intention of moving to Nashville to to do that. That was not my intent. I had other plans too. Until I just an opportunity came across my door to be able to come down here. I had never thought of it before, so was there um that moment for you that you were like you wanted to do it, but then you thought that's not practical.

Road Gigs, Patty Loveless, And The Studio Pivot

Jeff King 11:46

Well so if I back up a little bit, mom used to take me to some of the shows at the Knoxville Coliseum. You probably remember the that over there, really old now. And I remember seeing Freddie Hart, remember Easy Loving, running that song, and I went to see Jerry Lee Lewis there, and there might have been a couple other really country, you know, artists that she took me to. So that kind of started my seeing those guys on stage going, How do you even get to I mean, how do what do you do to get there? I mean, how does that work? You know, so I had no idea. I was still too young to know you moved to Nashville and you work your tail off. But so fast forward in college, I had a job at a print shop that was a part-time job, and one of the guys that worked there was this guy named Steve. And uh he said, Hey, put together a band, you know, know you're a guitar player. You want to come play? I was like, sure. So my other buddy Jeff was a guitar player, and he worked at the same shop. And we went and sort of played in this band, and Steve played bass and sang, and then we got a drummer, and Steve was a really good singer. So our first gig was at the Elks Club in Elizabeth in Tennessee, which you you know that area because it's close up there. But I remember thinking at the end of the day, we made $30. Wow. That's $60 for the weekend. That's more than I was making at the print shop gig. I'm going, whoa, this is cool. But not only is it the money cool, it's fun. Yeah. And challenging. And, you know, and you definitely for me at that time I was in a contest with myself. Like, how do I get through the how do I get through the four sets and at the end of it go, I felt like I did a good job tonight. I never ever got to that spot. It was just always fun, and we had a good time, and you know, a certain amount of chaos was going on all around us, but it was fun. I kept thinking, boy, something's really got into me, and I just really love doing this. And so I finished school and got my degree, and then I thought, well, I guess I'm gonna move to Nashville to see if I can get a job. And uh, I had to come down between my junior and senior year to try to get a job at Opry Land. So I went into the uh audition, you know, you say, and uh standing outside at Opri Land, and there's a you know, six or eight guitar players, and they're all playing jazz, and I'm going, man, I don't know how to play any of this stuff. And it's like, what are you gonna play? And I went, I don't know, maybe I'll play the melody to last date. And now looking back, I'm going, surely there was a Dwayne Eddy song or something that would have been cool, you know. But uh, and this guy in front of me was really nice. He said, I think you might want to show play something with some chords in it to show them that you know some chords because it it to get this job, you're gonna need to be able to memorize stuff and you're gonna have to know how to play things because they're gonna say, here's a song, we're gonna do this, whatever, tomorrow, next week, whatever. You're gonna have to learn it. You need, you know, you need to focus on this. Of course, I didn't get the job, but I did remember him saying that, and then I started thinking about that. And I think I went back another time and auditioned and didn't get the job. And I'm so thankful for everyone that turned me down there because things might not have been the same. Because of then I had to hustle. You know, I had to go, I had to go get better, and I'd go around town and I'd see these guys and go, man, these guys are so good. And I'd had a list of little mini cassette recorder and I'd take it with me. And if I saw somebody really good, I'd record 30 minutes of them. All the clubs had great, there were a lot of clubs, there was a lot of music in the, you know, 83, 84 when I moved to Nashville. So there was a lot of opportunities to hear great stuff. And a lot of those guys became big time section players, and they were younger then, and they were just they were slight years ahead of me. And I was going, how do you again, how do you do this? Yeah. So I became friends with all of those guys, which I still am today, but I'd get that microcressant and I'd go home and I'd just listen. Most of the time it would baffle me because they would play country and jazz at the same time. And so they and I'd just go, boy, some of these notes I just can't hear. I don't I don't hear that note. I know there's a note there, but I don't know what it is. So it forced me to continue to play and find my own version of whatever that is. So you finished ETSU, that's your degree. Yeah.

Austin Moody 16:50

Architecture.

Jeff King 16:51

And and uh engineering technology. Okay.

Austin Moody 16:53

And then you moved to that year. So what'd you do when you got here? What were your well, and that's when I started all this stuff. You started you started playing right when you No, I started listening.

unknown 17:05

Okay.

Jeff King 17:05

And I was trying to get away. What did you do for a living? Well, first I worked at service merchandise at the warehouse. That was rough. But hey, you know, if that's what I had to do, I mean I was, you know. But anyway, I I was there for about three months, and then I answered an ad in the paper looking for a guitar player, just blindly looked. And so it ended up. I went, I called him, and I think it was the kind of thing where if you just called, you got the job. So I got the job, and the rest of the guys, the piano, there was a piano player, a girl singer, and a sax player. And they had just moved here from Texas, so we all got the job and got a bass player, a drummer. And the singer was an architect that I knew that I had no idea this who this was, so it all just kind of went like, what? How's this all coming together? So we played, you know, once a month for him, random places around, little shows here or there. And then the the guys in the band where they came from Texas, they were a band. They said, Hey, you want to go if we if we don't do this anymore, we can go on the road and make better money and and we can just go on the road. It'll be fun. And you want to do this? And I'm like, Yeah. So I didn't get a job. I couldn't get a job anyway in in my degree because everybody wanted somebody with experience, and you know, I didn't have any.

Learning Sessions: Time, Tone, And Taste

Austin Moody 18:38

So Were you was there a was up there also like so at this time you've you've gotten sort sort of your foot in the door. Was there like a fear of going if if I go down the path of my degree, will I ever come back to trying to make this work? Had to be a little bit of questioning there whether going up, do I play the safe route? Right.

Jeff King 19:05

Well do I do this?

Austin Moody 19:06

I did try to get a job. You did?

Jeff King 19:08

Yeah. After a couple times, interviews and people saying no because I had no experience with it, then I called and got this thing, you know, and uh we did these gigs. And then the next thing I know, I'm out on the road with these guys, and we're doing clubs where a band comes in from out of town, and we'd be there six nights a week, four sets a night. I'm thinking, nothing else is gonna make you play better than I am. And which was great because I had a briefcase full of mini cassettes. And I get up in the day and I was learning these things, and I'd go try them at night, and sometimes it'd be a terrible disaster. But sometimes I'd go, oh, oh, here's how this connects together. So I did that for about three years. And then remember my friend and the band back at college?

unknown 19:59

So

Jeff King 20:00

He had gone to MTSU in their recording degree, and he was working for one of the big time engineers up here as a second engineer, which is the guy that does all the like rolls all the mic cables, puts all the mics out there, does uh he's basically the assistant to the engineer. So he was working for one of the big time engineers, and they were recording a Patty, Patty Loveless was the new artist, so they were recording her record. And she was very new, and her manager was her brother, and he was new, and they were like, Yeah, we've got to get a band together. And my friend called me and goes, Hey, there's this girl that's doing this really cool stuff. You know, you want me to give him your name, tell him you might be interested. I'm like, Yeah, that'd be great. So I get a call, and he goes, his name was Roger, it was Patty's brother, and Roger said, Hey, we're gonna get together over here at this place and you want to come and play. And I'm like, Okay. Now, back up a little bit. In in between there, I've done auditions for artists, where you go into a rehearsal studio and you stand in a line of about 12 people, and people are playing in front of you, and you're going, man, this guy's good, or this guy's, you know, you're you're thinking all this stuff. And I'm going, I don't, I don't know how I don't know how this is going to work. But they give you one or two songs to learn, and you learn them. So anyway, I sort of knew how that went. I hope this is not one of those auditions because I don't do well in this, too nervous. And so I go in and we're at the old Acuff Rose building, which is used to be on 8th Avenue across from the Sonic. You might know that building, but went in. It was really hot up there in the attic where we were rehearsing. So, bass player, drummer, acoustic player, steel player, and myself, we all show up and we don't know any, we don't know each other. Hey, how you doing? So we start playing a couple paddy songs that they sent to us, and and okay, well, we're gonna rehearse these next four days. And it's like, well, are we in I mean, are we in in the band? I mean, is well, how does this work? Yeah. Like, wow, okay. We like everything we're hearing, so it sounds like sounds good. So, you know.

Austin Moody 22:20

Was she was she the was this her first record and just kind of bass level yeah, first record?

Adapting Sounds Across Decades

Jeff King 22:26

And you know, she had done the same things that I had done, toured out and clubs, lots of clubs. So she was at all the rehearsals like we were normally, you know, and then we started playing dates. So I was with with Patty's band for about five years or maybe five and a half. And then by that point, I was starting to get called for a few sessions here in Nashville, and I thought, man, you know, this is great. Patty's awesome, a wonderful person, you know, still in contact with her after all these years. And and I thought, I've got I I was starting to feel this thing inside me that goes, okay, it's time. Like, it's time to what? It's time to get off the road and try to chase this session dream, which I'd learned more and more about as we go along. And so I remember the day, it was in December and probably, I think it was 91, that I called Patty and I said, I think it's time for me to move on. And she said, Well, I'm making some changes in the band, but you're not you weren't going to be one of them. So, you know, if you want to stay, you're welcome to stay. And I went, I think it's time that I I've been doing this, you know, five and a half years. We're we're hit, we're going back to a lot of these same arenas that we'd done before where we opened for all these people. And she had her like big old hits. She'd had a few big hits, yeah. And and I was so fortunate to be there and so thankful. And, you know, it it hurt my heart a little bit to leave, but I kept thinking, you know, I got a feeling that for me, there's probably going to be more, something that I needed to move on to. And so then I started really trying to focus on the session thing. And at that point, you know, I was maybe doing a session every two weeks, and I go home and practice, and boy, um, maybe I should have done this, maybe I should have done this. And practice, practice, and get sounds and work on your amps and stuff like that. And then I started getting a little more and a little more, and um, I don't know if you know my friend Spadey Brandon, but he was is a bass player. He's semi-retired now, but he's also writes novels, which is doing great with that stuff. So he called me one day, and we had met on a session before, and he said, My my guy that I call all the time, who he grew up with was Chris Losinger, played on all the Garth stuff. He said, Chris is starting to get really busy, played on this Garth stuff, he's moved him up to the next level, so he's not doing as many demos, and uh, you know, I know you're really trying to hustle, and so uh, why don't you come do a bunch of these with us? So all of a sudden, I started getting went from like one every two weeks to, you know, maybe five every two weeks, maybe ten sessions a month. And I'm thinking, wow, okay, this is cool. I'm really getting to learn how to craft this stuff. Because you can play all day with the radio or sit and practice by yourself, but when you go into a song and they're doing anywhere between three and five songs in three hours, you have to make decisions fast and you have to be creative fast, and you have to think about okay, here's the song, here's this groove, and here's this key. And if they want a guitar hook, I have to be able to come up with a guitar hook that somebody wants to hum when they leave. And you just work on that and work on it and work on it and work on it. And then, and then I had what I like to call option anxiety because you think, oh, I could do this, I could do this, I could do this. Until I learned over time, don't think about all that. Go in and sit down and pick up the guitar. What are you gonna do? What what do you feel first? And then adapt from there.

Austin Moody 26:23

And so Do you have other session guys like that you admired around you that try to give these tidbits to you?

Jeff King 26:31

Oh yeah, yeah.

Austin Moody 26:32

Was there a particular guy who really works?

Jeff King 26:38

Spadey was great to me, and and he would say, Why don't you try this? Nobody was ever like, that's awful. You know, nobody's ever real degrading, but I did have so this was before clicks when we were keeping you had to have time and you were worked on your time as well. Come home, sit with a metronome, and practice your eighth notes. And one time a keyboard player did turn around, just playing, and he turned around at the end of his at the end of his song, and as the notes were ringing now, he looked at me, he said, You need to learn to subdivide. I said, What do you mean? He goes, instead of dirt d thinking as so that'll help these instead of going dirt dirt dirt, because that'll drift dirt dirt dirt in your mind. He said, Your time will get better, and you need to get better. I don't like, whoa, okay. So I did.

unknown 27:30

Yeah.

Jeff King 27:32

But yeah, there were lots of guys that would I was thrown in with uh the the guys that were older than me that were our established somewhat, you know. And you know, sometimes you're you walk out and you're thinking, I'm lucky that somebody didn't shoot me right then because maybe I didn't play something that was cool or played over top of somebody or, you know, all these things that you have to learn as you're doing this. And but a lot of those guys were really, really nice to me and very helpful. Very thankful to them all.

First-Call Status And Studio Psychology

Austin Moody 28:07

So for I mean, kinda what I already know about you, but other people don't, I want to talk about from going from love to session, what is what is the the talent discipline ratio for like, you know, you know, people look at it and go, oh, that guy's just just extremely naturally talented. I want to talk about like the discipline that goes beyond that in the sense of like what you're saying, you're going getting better, right? So being able to just you know, be a prod you you see these young prodigy guys, right? These little these kids that you know we're out of guitar or whatever else. In some scenarios, you throw them into the session world, they're not gonna be able to do what they do just because they got they got all the talent in the world. So what's that ratio when it comes to going going into sessions and having that much pressure? What people don't see behind the scenes. You going home and you're going, I gotta get better at this. Mm-hmm. What's that look like?

Jeff King 29:31

In those are early stages to become, you know Well, you know, like they say, one listen is worth a thousand words is a studio comment that's used often, meaning that you know, when you're not cutting demos, if you're cutting a record, it used to be one song every three hours. So you run through it a couple times and then we take one. And we'd go in and w one listener's worth a thousand words instead of sitting out here talking about this and talking about this. Let's go listen and see how it feels, because that's the ultimate, that's the ultimate closer of all of it. Because you go in there and you listen and go, boy, my part sucks. It's not helping this in. I need to change to something. Or I like what my part does because your job as a studio guitar player is to support the song, not try to be a you know, anything other than a support. And and, you know, if you come up with a cool lick that supports the song, great. If you play a cool solo that supports the song, great, but you're not. You know, I think you get called from being for being well-rounded, as opposed to, you know, doing like a being a shredder or something. Because I mean, guys sometimes get called to do a solo on something like that. But you know, you have to learn, you have to take it from the bottom where the song is. And I guess where I was headed with this is sometimes doing a record or something, you hear it later. Like if it's a demo, somebody'd send you, oh man, hey, these turn out great. You listen to them, and um most of the time I would just be going, oh, you know, this sounds out of tune. This maybe it's not, maybe it is, maybe something else, I don't know. But boy, you know, I I thought my sound was better. I have to remember to make this, you know, and then you go back in to practice and practice. You're kind of doing this all along, working on your tones. Because to sit here in a room and play through an amp is one thing, but to put a microphone on it this big and hear it is another thing because it's a different. A lot of people might disagree on this, but it's a different sound. You have to adjust your amp to sound, make this sound good, this microphone. Where you, if you're in the room, you might sound different, you know. Yeah. Um, for instance, I noticed that I did a showcase one time, and they said, uh you play on this record, just have your cardio guys bring all your gear that you used on this record, and that's what we want to use on this showcase. So it sounds the same. I did, and I remember standing in front of my rig, going, what? It's this sounds so different. It's mid-rangy, and you know, had some low stuff and some top end stuff. And I was going, and the last thing I left was a session, and I'm going, wow, that's interesting, because that's not how I would play it live. Hey, I would darken it up or brighten it up or whatever. But, you know, um I did that that came this way because it was in front of a microphone, and yeah, most of the time I used or you know still do, but use heads and cabinets, so this he the head's right beside me, and I can reach down and turn something. I don't have to get up my number and yeah, you know.

Avoiding Burnout And Staying Creative

Austin Moody 32:53

So you just learn this, you learn too, when people tell you to do something, you go somewhere in your brain where you go, well, they don't understand when you go from the session to live, it's not gonna sound the same. So I want to show up and I'm not gonna say anything, but I'm gonna make it right. Oh, yeah.

Jeff King 33:12

You make it right for the room you're in, you know. And but you know, all that brings you to a spot where for me, I'd just be devastated. You know, if I heard something that I didn't sound as good as I wanted to sound on, then it's just be oh, I'm gonna go on to practice and I'm gonna, you know.

Austin Moody 33:31

So you when was your first session? What what year was uh roundabout?

Jeff King 33:37

Oh maybe eighty-seven. Okay. Something like that.

Austin Moody 33:41

And then how long did it take? No, maybe eight maybe eighty-six. How long did it take when you were kind of like, okay, I'm doing this m well days a week.

Jeff King 33:52

Yeah, it built up steam and until I was, you know, during the uh busiest part of my career, I was probably you know, a session is three hours, starts at ten, and at one you stop and then you have lunch, and then at two, another one starts, stops at five, and maybe I have one byte or whatever, and the next one starts at six. A lot of times you're in the same place. A lot of times you're moving three different places in a day. Yeah. I mean, that's how many you can have. You can have they used to do 10 PMs, so when there was so much work, you'd work all that. That some of the guys before me were doing like four sessions a day and just stop not sleeping.

Austin Moody 34:31

Yeah. So you went through the nineties, the two thousands, then post-2010, and they're here, you know, four or five different variations of country music. I know you play a lot of other music, but mostly it's been country. Tell us about a little like it's interesting to me, like where you're at now, you've gone, okay, this is the sound going on right now. This is the hot sound. I've got that down. And then is it a gradual change? So the whole time is just a slow, gradual to tones, to what you're playing, to what's working, to how things are moving. What's that transition like? Kind of going. Because I mean, if you're gonna if you're gonna be at the top of the session world, you've gotta adapt as time goes on and different variations of music is happening. From the 90s to the early 2000s is completely different.

Jeff King 35:41

I think one of the coolest things as a guitar player is for somebody to come up and go, man, whoever played on this record is really cool. It's really I really like what they did. And sometimes that was the that was the pinnacle of what you wanted. You wanted no to not be as a session player, you wanted to be a chameleon and be able to do whatever. So you have to learn about what a clean sound does and what a dirty sound does. And, you know, I mean, I don't know if you can see all these amps, but the matchless, the rev, the baseman, the martial, you know, they're all different variations of sounds. So and within a day, I mean, I'll use all these at some point. You know, style's changing. You just gotta kind of listen to the listen to stuff. You know, I think it starts happening here in town about a year before things come out, though, or maybe a year and a half. You people start different players that are coming in will bring something new, and and they're often paired on the session with another guitar player, and sometimes that's a newer guy and a guy that's been you know here for a while, and both of them learn from each other, and so that's just pollinating everybody, you know, with different things. So I don't know that there's a real good answer for that, but yeah, you know.

Austin Moody 37:09

It it makes sense. I mean, like I said, it's probably a gradual thing evolving over time, every day, every week, every month as things are changing. That's all it happened overnight. Yeah. So what do you think? I know this will be a hard question for you because you're such a humble guy, and you're still probably in your mind going, How can I get better? Oh yeah, every day. You know. And so what's how do you think you got to the point to where you were the first call from massive artists? Tony you know, producers like Tony Brown and and all these guys that go, all right, I'm booking this session, and here's my drummer, my bass player, and I'm gonna call Jeff King first to see if he can play guitar on this. What do you think made the difference? It can be all the above talent, the way you are in the room, the way you communicate.

Fatherhood, Tradeoffs, And A Graduation Flight

Jeff King 38:10

I think all of those things. Yeah. And I mean, you know, Mac first thing is you have to be able to be creative and deliver something. And then along with that, not instead of, but you know, you need to be a a a good hang in the room and not be positive and come in and be happy. I mean, man, I'm happy to be there. You know, whoever it is, I'm happy to be there playing guitar. Yeah. And then you know, lots of times you have to be a good listener because you're listening to what somebody's trying to tell you. Sometimes artists are not some are great, some are not so great because it's not what they do. And sometimes when they're trying to tell you something, they you they don't have the same words that you're used to hearing, like from your bass player buddy who'll say, Hey, play eighth notes here. The artist might go, I I wish you could play something that was more like percussive. And you go, I'm not sure what that means. And and you find out it's just don't dun don't dun don't you know. You have to be able to interpret that, but not go, what an idiot. You know, why didn't you just say that? Because they don't they don't know the term.

unknown 39:23

Yeah.

Jeff King 39:24

Because they don't live in this world every day. They'll come in and do a record for two weeks. It's always very hard for me. Well, you hear from everybody, but you know, the ability to, you know, take that language and translate it into music, that's that's an important part because then you feel comfortable with somebody being there. You know they're not gonna blow up at the artist when he says something like, Hey, I mean, if I could say how many times some artist or writer or whatever has said, hey, try this, and in my mind I go, This is not gonna work, it's the silliest idea. But I go, okay, let's try it. Two for two reasons. It might work. And the second thing is they've heard it. And if it doesn't work, they've heard it and then we can move on. Yeah. So, so many times I've done something like that and go, I don't know how in the world this worked. I would have never done this. But note to self. Put that back there and you know, be aware that, you know, even if they can't translate what they need to say, they might be telling you something that's really cool. Yeah. Because it's their song and they've lived with it.

Austin Moody 40:33

So it's kind of like, you know, the patient telling the doctor what he needs to do.

Jeff King 40:38

Yeah.

Austin Moody 40:39

And I've also seen guys in the in the room that could shut down a holiest idea.

Jeff King 40:45

Yeah.

Austin Moody 40:46

You know, yeah. And then all of a sudden, it gets real awkward.

Jeff King 40:52

That's why I'm good with jokes. Because then I come up with something like that and we start laughing in. But yes, and I've seen guys not be asked back because I'm with that kind of discussion shows these.

Austin Moody 41:04

At the end of the day, you know, that artist is paying for it one way or the other. Yeah. You know? And yeah, I I remember shoot. Uh yeah, I've heard tons of stories like that, and I've it I've had it happen to me. And a lot of those guys uh thank God for home studios because it would be working otherwise.

Jeff King 41:27

Yeah.

Austin Moody 41:28

You know. So how when you're doing, you know, in the late 90s, 2000s, were you doing like four three, four sessions a day? I was doing three every day. Sometimes how you handle how do you not burn out? Well you do in that many. Yeah. You do what do you think what do you do? Because I mean you gotta go back in the next week, the next day, and do it. You can't I mean, if you get a call for a record, you get booked all the time. It's not like you can go well, I guess you could. But probably an underlying fear of like, well, if I don't, somebody else is gonna come in. Mm-hmm. Right. So what do you do even for your hands, for your mind?

Jeff King 42:11

Well, after hearing music all day on the way home, sometimes I would put on either talk radio just to g get my mind off something, or I'd put on something classical and listen to 'em the melody. Or I'd find just some something on the radio that didn't require a lot of thought. My mind wouldn't go, Well, that kick drum's doing this, and you know, wow, that's cool. I'd just do some sort of melodic thing and just make your mind chill a little bit. And and sometimes, you know, you might get up a little early the next morning and come come down, go down and play for a little while, and before you go to a session, and and then I would listen to some of the stuff that would happen when I was going through that is I'd go to a CD store or a record store at the time, and I'd buy 10 new records, ten new CDs, whatever, and I'd just have them in my car seat and listen to different stuff all day in between sessions. And sometimes that would uh, you know, not in the genre. I'd get some, I'd buy a jazz record, I'd buy a world music record, I'd buy a rock record, listen to U2, whatever. I mean, it's all guitar parts are guitar parts. They can all be adapted and you know, nestled into something that's where you need something. So I was just trying to learn some of that stuff, and occasionally it would be, you know, I'd go to a music store and see a new guitar and buy a new guitar or buy a new amp or buy a new pedal or whatever. Yeah. And get to hear something different for a while. Because part of that is hearing that same sound over and over and over and over again. And, you know, changing that up will cause you to feel different and cause you to think different. So And I think part of burning out is just being tired. You know, you really have to take care of yourself in this kind of career because you have to protect your brain and your ears, and you just need to to recharge. And we were all probably working too much. You know, I'd leave the house at nine in the morning and get back at ten at night, and there's not a lot of time in between to recharge. And I mean, there were days, I had a few days where, you know, somebody would say, Hey, I cut a session and I want you to overdub on three of the songs. When can we do it? And I'm like, I remember saying this one guy, you like to work early in the morning? He goes, Well, yeah, I'm up really early. I said, Let's meet at the studio at six. And I met these guys at six a.m. at studio, and I had all my stuff to leave her the night before, got up and I played on all their songs, and we finished up at nine. My guys came in and grabbed my gear, moved it to the next place, started at 10, moved to another place, went to two, another place at six, and then I had to go somewhere else for 10 p.m. that night, and I think I got through around 1 30, and I don't remember driving home. It was a it was like having way too much to drink. I was just like, my eyeballs were But yet then in the last song, I don't feel like I did anything different in the very last song of the day at that I did in the first song in the day because you know, you're just you attack. You feel that mode going and it's like so But you you did all this also raising three kids now.

Austin Moody 45:42

Yeah, that's cool. Growing up to be wonderful people. Oh, we have three wonderful kids. How did you balance it?

Real Estate As A Musician’s Safety Net

Jeff King 45:52

Well, lots of times after a two o'clock session when we finished at five, I would jump in a car and go to a basketball game, go to a football game, go to whatever the kids were doing, go back to work, see them next day, get up, take 'em to school, spend a little time with them in the mornings. You know, you're just making the best of it.

Austin Moody 46:14

Did you did it ever like hurt your heart?

Jeff King 46:18

Oh yeah.

Austin Moody 46:20

There are times you had to I mean, he says, I mean, it's this ain't like you're nine to five, you don't go to work, get a home at five.

unknown 46:26

Yeah.

Austin Moody 46:27

You've gone in the studio, on the road, all the things. What a you give me uh experience about what what that felt like a little bit. Well 'cause I I deal with that. It's heartbreaking though.

Jeff King 46:44

When you have to miss something and and you you I and you know I say you have to miss something, there's always a choice. But the choice is not an easy choice. Like, you know, my son's playing his last home game in football. But Faith Hill is cutting that day, and you know, you know, on a book you all day. Can you do it? I mean, you know, and that happened. I mean, that's the other stuff happened and and you go at that point, you're it's not simply a choice for your kid or for your work. Right. It's it's a there's a lot of massiveness sculpting both sides of that because you want to so much want to be there, but you know because I mean, well, that one opportunity, I mean, it's like you're going, well, what happens if I don't take this?

Austin Moody 47:48

You know, because there's everybody in this town wants that call. Everybody's right behind you, you know. But then your son is on the field and going, Well, where's Dad? Yeah. And he doesn't understand. I don't maybe he did understand, but I don't know. That's that's a yeah, I'm sure he does now. Some of the kids at the time. You don't know if they do or not. You know, you just like and they're not really supposed to.

Jeff King 48:18

That's part of that's a part of the job, you know. Rookie, man. We were out on the road a couple years ago, and one of the guys in the band missed his his his kid's uh high school graduation, and he was like, I just you know, he was in charge of the band, so he was like, uh I just don't know how I just don't know what to do. And you just do the make the best decision that you can make.

Austin Moody 48:41

Which brings up a r very interesting story. So last year, you're out on tour as the band leader for Brooks and Dunn. Delena's college graduation. Our youngest, yeah. Yeah. Y'all were booked in Florida, Jacksonville, or something like that.

Jeff King 49:04

We were booked in West Palm Beach was the first date of the tour. And we'd been rehearsing for a couple weeks. Of course I knew this, I'd known her graduation date, but not the time. And it was on the Saturday, which was the night after the first date of the tour. It was the second date of the tour on the Saturday where we played on the east coast of Florida. I can't remember what it was over there, but it was about a four-hour drive from West Palm Beach over to where it was. And I remember finding out the date in January, and this was May that this happened, and I remember going, oh my gosh, how am I gonna do this? And, you know, I brought it up to a couple friends, they're like, just get us up. And I'm going, but I have a responsibility as the band leader because generally after the first night, there will be changes because the flow isn't right, or we want to change some songs around, which that's not a bad deal at all. But people start changing songs and start saying, hey, you know, I didn't have enough time, let's add more time to this intro. Let's let's make this intro longer, but let's do something different. So the second day of soundcheck is going to be probably complex. And so I have a friend that has a plane, you know, Big City, Bernadette, and so I called him, and he was my flight instructor when I was taking flying license, but I didn't actually get my license, so I knew I couldn't fly myself. But I called Brian, he has a twin. I said, and Delena went to ETSU in Johnson City, so I'm thinking I'm gonna be down in Florida. How do I get from Florida to Johnson City and back? So I my wife checked all of them, all the airlines, and there's no way that could happen, you know. And uh Brian said, I don't think I can make this work with my twin. I don't think it's fast enough for you. He said, but let me let me work on this. And a couple weeks later he calls and he said, Hey, do you remember Justin? Do you remember Justin from flight school? I went, Yeah, I remember him. Yeah, he's a really nice guy. He he said, You well, he works for a company that has charter jets now. And plus he has his own plane. And I said, Oh, okay. And because I'd called all the private pilots that I knew working in the world, you know, and and they're like, oh man, you know, even called one company and they're like, oh, this would be 20 grand. I'm like, oh, okay, you know. So called Justin and he says, I explained the situation. I said, here's the deal, and here's my time frame, here's what I got to do. And I said, he said, I said, Brian told me that, you know, I should call you and and ask you, maybe you knew somebody that could help or whatever. He goes, Man, I I'll help you. I've got two kids too, and if if I can help you, then then then I'll feel good about it. And I went, okay, well, how does this work? And he goes, I've got a Pilato or Pilates. He said it's a turbo, and he said, two hours, two hours each way. I was like, Really? And he said, You pay for the you pay for you pay the expenses, I'll fly that. So we did the first night, and I talked, uh, usually the buses would all run together in case somebody broke down. And I talked to the tour manager and I said, Can our bus leave when we're done and go to the east coast? He said, sure. And I told Justin, I'll meet you in the lobby. I'm gonna get you a room and I'll meet you at the lobby of this hotel at 6 a.m. on Saturday morning. The day of her graduation. The day of her graduation. So we the show went great.

Austin Moody 52:55

And then you had to play that night.

Home Studios, Cartage, And Shrinking Budgets

Jeff King 52:56

Yeah. And I I went over to respective buses after after the show and said, How'd everything feel? Great. Everything's cool. It's like, okay, I'll see y'all tomorrow. I didn't really say what when I'd see them tomorrow, what I'd be doing, because Ronnie and Kicks really wouldn't come to soundcheck. Yeah. Occasionally they would. But general rule is that they didn't, but you know, sometimes they would. So I talked to my guitar jack and I said, you know what I'm supposed to play, you know my guitars. Just we just need to make sure everything's working. That's what soundcheck is. You know, you run through a couple songs and everybody makes sure all their acoustics, electrics, fiddles, steels, everything works perfect out front. No, you know, problems with gear. So he says, okay. So I meet uh Justin at 6 a.m. and we get to the airport. He does pre-flight, we leave 7:30, whatever. I'm landing in Johnson City at 9:30, quarter of 10. I'm going, whoa. Okay, half of this is over, and I'm still nervous wreck about the back half because that's the big part. So go to we go to early lunch with the whole family because we're all there instead of after graduation dinner, we do this lunch thing. Then graduation got instead of 10 a.m., it gets pushed back to 2 p.m. And I'm going, oh gosh. So I go to graduation. Delaney is in the back, of course, and oh, they have to go through all the colleges and all the things before that. And so finally she walks. And when she does that, I you know, I waved. She knew we were gonna be leaving, and I waved and said bye to the family. And I think it was about five o'clock at that point. And I'm going, I don't see how this is gonna work. Show starts at nine in Florida. So I go out, my son takes me to back, takes us back to the little Tri-Cities Airport. And Justin looks around, he looks at the plane, fires up, and does his pre-flight. Boom, we're out. It's raided like crazy. We're all above the clouds, and we're landing. And we were playing an amphitheater in the I can't remember the name of the town it was, the city. And luckily the airport was like 10 minutes away. And I remember we came in and he said, Hey, there's the amphitheater right there. And so we had to make a turn like this to come in. And he turns us and then he does the wings like this, and he said, Look, right over there it is, and showing me. At that point, my dear friend Mark Hill is standing out in the parking lot. It's 8 15. And he's sitting there and he sees this airplane goes by, and I get by that point I can get text. And he goes, Are you in that airplane? Yes. He was like, Oh my gosh, we land. They have a car waiting for us because the tour manager knew there was about five of us that knew what was going to happen that day. I didn't want to put this word out and get everybody all rattled. I show up at 8:30, you know, go to the dressing room. And by that point, I'm shaking and have to have a little cocktail to calm down a little bit, and we play the show. Justin's backstage hanging out. He's having a great time. I'm having a great time. You know, it cost a little bit, but it's like, man, but what a day, you know. I got that were in one time where it all worked out. Yeah. Yeah.

Austin Moody 56:19

Good day. It usually doesn't work out like that, but yeah, yeah. I love that. So long time ago, you were when I don't know what we were talking about, but I I was a new young artist. We had become friends, and you gave me a lot of advice early on, and you told me whenever I started to make a little money by rental property. And that's something you did what now twenty-five, thirty years ago. Late nineties. And so what's interesting to me is you started buying real estate and rental properties early on in your career when you started to have some success. And as I know you now, even though you're still at the top of the game, you're still the first call for a lot of huge artists and producers. If you didn't get another call, you'd be okay. Because you invested a long time ago in real estate and you haven't stopped. You're building you're building a couple houses down in Millie Island now. I don't know what you got going on here. Well, yeah, those are done and we don't have any building in product. But what was um was there somebody that told you gave you that same advice early on? Because musicians, what I remember you telling me is we don't have a retirement plan.

Jeff King 57:50

Right.

Austin Moody 57:52

And that it would be a great decision if I've invested in real estate as soon as I could, which was great advice because that saved my ass in 2020. Yeah. And so what was your you know, I know a lot of folks would be interested in knowing because you were smart enough to do that.

AI Demos, Opportunity, And Limits

Jeff King 58:12

Well, I don't know if it was smart enough, but you know, when when my wife and I got married, I had a ho there's an area of town here called Sillon Park, which was transitional at as I would say. And I bought a an old Tudor style house over there, and it had it had a main floor, and it had an outside uh outside staircase to an upstairs, an attic apartment. It was a separate, I don't remember if it was a separate meter or what, but I was rent that came with a renter at the time when we moved in. And I remember going, wow, this is cool. This helps out with my mortgage, you know. At the time, whatever my maybe say my mortgage was uh, you know, 1500 or 1800 a month, all of a sudden it went down to 1200 a month or 900, whatever, you know. And my wife lived in Sylvan Park as well, and she had just bought a duplex, and she was living in the front half, and the back half was making about 80% of the mortgage payment. And I'm going, and when we got married, we we lived in in my house, and so all of a sudden we had three rentals, and we're going, oh, this is paying for our rent, and it's paying the mortgages. So going, wow, this is cool. So you know, we're both going, hmm. So we didn't take any courses and we didn't have anybody explain this to us. So I just sort of tripped and fell into this because I had this friend at the bank, and to explain how I had this friend at the bank, when you're a musician. And you're working sessions, you don't get paid from the union. The union basically makes sure that you get paid from whoever you're supposed to get paid from, and they keep track of everything, but they don't write you checks. You get paid from whoever you worked for. So if I did 15 sessions in a week, I might get 15 different checks. So I'd go to the union and I'd pick up a stack of checks every couple weeks. And instead of going to the teller, I made this friend that was an officer at the bank, and she said, Come over here. I'll just take care of this stuff for you. You can just come in anytime I'm here, you just come over here because you know there's people come in, big lines, and you're up there trying to cash this. You know, she'd I'll take care of this for you. So we got to be really good friends. And one time I'm there and she said, Hey, I want to sign you up for HELOC. And I said, What's a HELOC? She said, It's a home equity line of credit. It's like you'll get a checkbook that you can do and it's very low interest. I went, uh, I don't think I want this. You know, how or how like you can get credit cards from everywhere, but I'll stop doing that. I'm like, I don't. She goes, I think you do. I was like, Whoa. She goes, look at it this way. She said, You don't owe anything unless you write a check. I said, Really? And she said, Yeah, and the interest rate's really low. So whatever you need it for, home improvement. And she knew we're in a property. She said, Do you want to make a down payment on a property? You know, you can use this. And I took it home and I was like to my wife Tammy, I said, got this thing called a HELOC. And she was like, Oh, I know what that is. And we decided to use that instead of coming out of pocket, we decided to see what it would feel like to for us to make our money to live on and let this other money feed itself, basically, you know, other people's money, what you always hear about as you're going through this. So we bought a handful of duplexes and single-family homes using that because at the time you needed, what is it, 20 or 25% down payment to avoid the mortgage insurance or whatever. We didn't want to deal with any of that. So we'd write that check. Now, I'm creating debt over here, but I'm also getting gain from these houses that are and and duplexes. You're getting what they call one guy explained to me, said, You have, you know, eight properties, but you have 15 doors. Like, what? And he goes, that's how many people are how many establishments are in all those, how many doors that pay rent. And I went, oh, okay. So we figured out how we could pay those mortgages and have a payment on this. Even if we we didn't expect to make any money from this. We just all of this we wanted to break even. And when we started getting ahead a little bit at a time, as you know, from how you just I started putting in an account over there because of the air conditioner's going to break, and that's three grand, and I didn't want to pay for it. So I wanted everything to be self-sustaining. And in the in the big picture, you you want all that to go until things start getting paid off. Then you just have income. So the whole time we were doing this, we were like we were really busy, both of us. She's a great fiddle player as well, and singer and songwriter. And we were really busy. We didn't need that money to s to support our life. We just left it, let it go. And and you know, as those, like I said, as those things pay themselves off, then you have a little bit of retirement. Or you can use that to pay down other debt you might have. And we used when they started paying themselves off, we paid the HELOC back, and even, you know, sure, got it uh back to zero.

Austin Moody 1:03:59

So how important do you think it is for musicians or you know, guys that are owner operators or their own companies that they they're not putting into a retirement plan, they're not putting in for this and or that it's not the corporate style. How d how important is it, especially for creatives and artists and songwriters, to think about that, in your opinion?

Advice To Young Players: Broaden Your Skills

Jeff King 1:04:26

I think it's it doesn't seem like it's important at the time, because when you're 30, 60 or 65 or whatever feels a long ways away. And it's like it is, but you've got time to t to get things in order so you can enjoy that time. And at the time, you know, we were working really hard, making great money, and a lot of my money was going into my union pension. So again, you know, the union doesn't hire you for anything. They don't pay you. You're in the union because they help track down all of your balances, you know, your and and they offer some protection of some stuff, and they have a a pension plan. And I thought there was a lot of talk about that's not gonna be here. I thought, well, if that's not gonna be here, then what will we do? I mean what will we do when we retire? Or how do we how I don't know how we'll retire in the music business. I mean, I still love to play guitar every day, used to involve to write songs, I mean but you don't sometimes I think there will be a point where we don't get the calls to do stuff like we used to. And so we just decided to follow that up on the real estate. Hopefully that would work out, provide some sort of security and at retirement or slowdown time or whatever you want to call it.

Austin Moody 1:05:56

Yeah. So how how would your lot be different right now if you didn't do that?

Jeff King 1:06:03

Well, it definitely is another job. We took care of all those properties ourselves for a long time. And I think at one point we had about 14 properties. Maybe I I can't really remember, but at some point Tammy said, maybe we need to get a company that to manage these for us so we don't have to go over there to collect went and you know and it was great. I wish we'd have done that earlier. You know, we Because we had several of them. And you know, if a plumber, you know, if there's a problem with a water heater and somebody calls you at 5 30 in the morning, hey, I've got to go to work today, I have hot water, what do I do? Well, go to the holiday and and and I'll pay for it. I mean, I'll start, you know. Yeah, what would I want to happen? That's the way we always ran our stuff. How would we deal with it if we were there? Like, let's turn this over to management. Let them, they have plumbers, they have everybody. Uh they can deal with it. So it worked out. Yeah. And you know, still ongoing. We're still paying for some of that stuff, and some of it's starting to loosen up a little bit.

Austin Moody 1:07:12

Well, things have worked out well though for both of y'all's career. So you hadn't hit a streak. Yeah, you hadn't hit a cold streak.

Jeff King 1:07:19

I'm very thankful.

Austin Moody 1:07:20

You know. And that as uh times went on. Studios. When did studio studios start shutting down in Nashville to where you knew you needed to create a home studio to be able to do overdubs and such?

Jeff King 1:07:38

I probably had a place for 25 years. It was albeit the first one was very small, just like a little direct, because I love to set and create things and I'd write songs, whatever, and when Tammy would write and we'd do little demos, and then I started getting more and more interested in it, and it started getting bigger and bigger until now I've got a whole place I can track here. But along with that same time, the business started changing. There weren't record sales like there were before, so everything started being streaming. So the actual sales of a product started going into a slump. And then, if you, you know, in several ways to look at this, there was less product being sold, which occasion, you know, there's still Walmart and Target. I don't know if they have records or CDs still or whatever, but I mean, do you have a CD player in your car? I don't now. So everything's streaming and or radio. And so a lot of the studios that were charging, you know, two grand $2,500 a day, all of a sudden the budgets for records were shrinking, and studios were going out of business. Real estate in Nashville became crazed. So Music Row, since it was right there close to downtown, lots of big businesses started moving their offices over there, build these big buildings and tear down studios.

Austin Moody 1:09:06

And I guess as a technology developed too. Yeah. I guess that was a major part of it because all of a sudden you could do what you do in the studio at your house.

Jeff King 1:09:19

Oh, yeah.

Austin Moody 1:09:20

You know, in the same quality. And so I'm sure that made an impact with, you know, well, now I don't have to go to the studio.

Jeff King 1:09:28

Well, no. Lots of people would go to the studio to track their records. They might book two days ago cut, you know, twelve songs or whatever, ten songs, whatever. And then they'd say, let's get basic tracks. And then do you have a place at your stud at your house? I'm like, Yeah, I'd have a place. And the thing about having a place at your house, it's like, well, I could go to Guitar Center and I can buy the cheapest thing and I can do this and this, but you know, you have to I had I went and bought the same thing that I play through when I go to Oceanway, so which is a massive studio here in town, or owned by Belmont now, but at the time Oceanway was its own thing. Or Starstruck or whatever, the kind of same kind of microphones, same kind of mic prees. Because I wanted to be able to get the the big expensive sound, as you would say, not cheap paper, you know, cheap mics. And so then people would go, okay, I'm gonna come over to your house these two days, we'll book that next week, and then we're gonna play guitar, and we'll do solos and stuff. So, you know, that started happening, and then people it people would pay you, would pay you well because they didn't have to pay for studio. Most of us know how to run our own rigs, and since it's overdubs and it's just me playing, I don't have a problem punching myself in and out. I can stop. I know enough, I've learned enough, then so I can handle my own rig. And sometimes they would bring an engineer, but if they didn't, they're saving money on the studio and engineer. They're saving money on cardage, which is the money it costs to have our all of our rigs show up at a studio because I've got stuff here.

Austin Moody 1:11:10

People won't know what cardage is, but say, you know, in the in the crazy days of your playing and you may be doing three sessions at three different studios, ex explain what cardage is in the sense of I mean they gotta have so cartage, all your your amps, your pedal board, your guitar cases that have to hold what five to ten.

Values, Discipline, And The American Hustle

Jeff King 1:11:37

Yeah, you know, eight or ten guitars in a big trunk.

Austin Moody 1:11:40

Yeah.

Jeff King 1:11:40

And I had an amp rack that was about this that had three or four heads in it, and then I had a big pedal board, and then some cases with miscellaneous talk, you know, talk boxes and other you had to have two or three of everything. Yeah, yeah.

Austin Moody 1:11:55

So it's kind of the same rig where you're playing a session, and then Cartage, they're taking a second rig over to the next studio, already having it in place, guitar is laid out, pedal board laid out, ready to go for you to go sit down, pick up the guitar, boom, boom, boom, and you're on again.

Jeff King 1:12:14

Yeah, and they're taking the other their other rig from that studio you just finished at and moving it to the six o'clock rig or the next morning or whatever needed to happen. But so and they're paid they're paid by the record company. So that way you have the same sound every day. And you know, if you had a three or four amps and you carry all that stuff in from your car and all your guitars and your pedal board, you're worn out by the time it's time to start playing.

Austin Moody 1:12:39

So this way it's That's roaring star status.

Jeff King 1:12:43

It's well, I think it's it's it's necessity when you're moving that many blazes, you know, because otherwise, then do you have time to stop and grab a bite of lunch or something, you know? So, you know, yeah, it's quite cool.

Austin Moody 1:12:57

That's what that was. So yeah. The good old days like hearing about them. Yeah, there was you know, nowadays. I mean, do you still I mean you still have cartridge on these big sessions?

Jeff King 1:13:12

Is it same amount kind of thing, or is it kind of tinkered where you had to have less rigs or well, you know, it goes back to what what you were talking about earlier, sounds changing. And with Carnage rig now, I have three heads. You know, I have an old baseman head and I have a a nailer head, which is kind of like uh kind of like one of a Marshall. Yeah. But but not as aggressive. And then I have another head, which is just sort of a magic thing, does whatever I want it to do. So I think with all those I can get whatever I need. I can get a heavier thing or I can get a cleaner thing or whatever. So, you know, just somehow it works and you juggle it until it all works, you know.

Austin Moody 1:14:01

So now I want to ask you about Do you think what AI is doing right now is going to affect mu musicians moving forward with now, it's not gonna affect guys like you. I mean, my opinion is guys like you, you ha you can't you can't make an AI Jeff King and what he does. You can't make an AI Gray Morrow and these guys who have a thing, right? Do you have a fear of how it's gonna affect the next generation of musicians trying to get into the session world? And do you think demo world is gonna be slaughtered?

Jeff King 1:14:50

I think demo world will be slaughtered. But there's good and bad to all of it. I mean So every demo session that I'm on now, or or no, let me rephrase that. Every master that I'm on now, we're cutting a record, the demo is generally an AI demo. Someone has fed something in, or or maybe they've had a demo of an old song and they put it in AI because they want to see what it comes up with. Sure. It's a great tool. Yeah. But when people I don't think AI's good, I think it's really, really good right now. I don't think that I would put it up against some of my favorite records. Sure. Because there are things that you know, AI searches from theoretically all music that's that's available. The song still needs to be a great song before you put it in air. Sure. Now, you you know, and I know you can put a great song on AI and it'll spit out something cool. And I can tell, and maybe, you know, maybe I don't know if everybody can tell or not, but since I've played guitar for so long, I know what it's supposed to sound like. I can hear sometimes the guitars just fizzle, and it's like they'll play lick and then they'll just sort of it'll kind of go away. And the sometimes the tones are super cool, and sometimes the fiddles are don't sound great, but it it does what it's supposed to do. Drums sound great usually. Vocals sound incredible. I want us, I want a guy, a burly guy, to sound like that sounds like whoever. Chris Stapleton is singing the song, you're gonna get that sound. That guy could get a record deal. And they have. But finally people caught on, like, no, no, you you can't that's a that's a something that doesn't exist. Yeah, you know, you can't, we can't do that. And I think is I might be wrong, but I think so I read some stuff about that the other day. And uh I get so much stuff here when people want me to over to and they write a song and they'll send me the the the demo and say, hey, we like what they did. Can you take that and improve on it? And lots of times I'll go, well, AI came up with a cool hook. But sometimes AI changes the chords of stuff, sure, you know, and good or bad, whatever, maybe that maybe sometimes you go, wow, I like that better. I wouldn't have thought of that.

Austin Moody 1:17:22

So I think now what you can what you can do with it, capabilities. I mean, I like to mess with things and see what it can do. Yeah. You know, so you can download the stems. If you like the drums, yeah and the bass, well, I I like that. Throw that in, trigger it with different drum sounds. But it's like the guitar, you know, the quality, when you break it down, you actually solo the things out. You're right. The the quality's not there, you know, for those kind of things. So, you know, for what you do, it's like perfect. It's like, well, I don't like what the guitar is doing, but I want to send it to Jeff, you know.

Jeff King 1:17:53

And lots of people will send me stuff and they'll go, hey, we want to start with you. I want you to replace the acoustics and the electrics on this. And and I will, and they say, we're gonna send this to a drummer and a bass player and a keyboard player afterwards, but because we like what this did, we want it real. And and you know, that means that take what it did. And if sometimes people say, I like this guitar rick, yeah. And you do just do this, I'm like, sure. Sometimes AI plays things that make you scratch your head on guitar or any instrument because it's like, well, it's not really uh easy to access whatever it's doing under your fingers. So, you know, sometimes I sit there and go, I can't get that note from whatever these combinations of whatever. So I have to kind of work my way through some tunings and go, oh, okay, here he is. Which is like, is that bad? No, because this makes me go, wow, that's cool. I'll do that again on by myself on another thing, you know, or not the same thing, but you know, opens up some options. But what's your worry about it? It's not great yet. But from zero to here, it's it's been fast, maybe five years, maybe others, ten, I don't know, whatever. How long is it gonna take from here to there? And at some point, my my buddy David Hungate, we were talking one day at a session, and he said, He said, 'I played on this uh Shania Twain record.' He said, We took a long time getting everything perfect. He said, It's a stunning record. Everything's perfect, sounds great. Not a kick drum out of place, not a nothing, you know. And he said, one day I was thinking while I was sitting in the lobby waiting on the guitar players, he said, I'm thinking about this guy that pulled up at a traffic light in this pickup truck with the windows down. He's, you know, he's got a Massie Ferguson hat on, and he's got two. Radio Shack speakers back behind, you know, when you had pickup truck and the seat folded forward when you only had the one seat, and you just stuck a couple speakers back there and it sounded terrible, but it didn't matter. You haven't filled in, you listen to the music. He goes, That guy's gonna be listening to this record. He goes, I'm not sure now. I'm starting to wonder where the cutoff is on how much who are we doing this for? You know, are we are we spending these uh extra half of extra hours making it sound great so we as musicians can sit back and go, wow, this is cool. Sure. The 90% of the population that listens to all this stuff, yeah, they don't care about MP3s anymore. You know, remember when MP3s didn't sound as good? Now, well, I don't know if they just don't sound any worse than they did or any better than they did, but now we've just come to accept that that's what it is. So I think the thing with AI, I mean, you can put in, uh, you know, you've messed with it, you can put in hometown, you know, tailgate, Friday nights, girl, cheerleader, beer, whatever, cold beer, down by the river. It'll spit out a song that's pretty dang cool. And it'll have a guy singing it that's pretty dang cool, or girl, whatever. And and you go, boy, where is this where does this go? This opens up so many great possibilities for so many great things. But it's also like when it starts getting really, really, really good, is it are people gonna stop calling me to play guitar on it because it sounds great?

Austin Moody 1:21:44

Again, I don't know. Yes, I know. Billboard number one country song was an AI.

Jeff King 1:21:49

Was it?

Austin Moody 1:21:50

I didn't Yeah, Billboard, the number one country song on the chart on Billboard was an AIDA. Can't remember what it was. You can look it up. Well, remember when Randy was a little bit of a article.

Jeff King 1:22:03

Yeah. And uh and it's like, well, it's great to hear Randy again, but it's not Randy. So I I don't know. I I mean I have different emotions about that.

Austin Moody 1:22:14

But right now, my publishers, what I hear in town. If a publisher knows that the demo was generated in an AI, they won't take it.

unknown 1:22:22

Yeah.

Austin Moody 1:22:25

And then songwriters are like, you know, I'm just gonna make a band name or something, you know, and say it was somebody because they're taking that out of my demo, out of my budget, right? I'm having to pay that back. Right. You know. But everybody's not thinking about it's kind of like the guy that goes out and you know, picks potatoes out of the gram. Well, now you can do it cheaper with an automated machine and bicaters itself, and it can work twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. We don't know what it's gonna do, but makes me wonder for future musicians. Yeah. And so that's my thing, like with you know, American Hustle, it's like, hey, you know, talking to the younger generation, you know, 2020 for me was kind of at a pivotal point. You and I just finished a record together down to Muscle Shoals. It was really cool. And 2020 came just for me, for a lot of guys that was at a certain point in their career, you know, on an upper jet trajectory. I mean, it was like a train hitting the canyon wall. It just came to a remote stand. Yeah. And so, you know, I started a little side hustle and thankfully turned into a nice business when showed me it's like, okay, this is how fast something can come to an end. So having your, you know, diversifying and whatever that means for you, it's like isn't a bad thing. And going, hey, a younger musician. Not saying you don't don't I'm not saying not to pursue your passion, not to go after it in your career, but just think about what's going on. And I hate the what ifs. Remember? I never liked the the the idea of a plan B. Because I feel like if you have a plan B, you'd never go after your plan A. Right. I don't agree. As you're looking at things and going, hey, here's what's here's what's going on, you know, when you can, it's probably a good idea to make sure, you know, if that time comes, you got something. Yeah you can still pursue your passion, you know.

Jeff King 1:24:45

If I were going to give advice to young players that want to get into this business, I would say learn your instruments, work on it, work hard. Also learn how to write a song, learn how to engineer, learn how to run. Like in Nashville, a lot of us use Pro Tools just because it is a standard for a long time. And there may be other things out there. I mean, there are, but you know, Pro Tools has just become the thing that most of us use that switch when we're at home studios. And and learn how to use all this programming stuff. I mean, learn how to use Suno and and all that stuff because it's an idea factory. You just gotta learn how to and you know, and just you know, get in it deep, get into all that stuff and learn how to create from beginning to end, you know.

Austin Moody 1:25:41

Yeah. Because I mean, even at the in being a musician, which you know guys on the road playing for other people, you know, at the end of the day. Okay You're it's just it's just like let's come let's with any other business. If it's not your name on the bill, yeah. You're building someone else's drone. Oh, absolutely, yeah. You know, you're building an artist artist dream, you're getting paid to to do that. And so what's what's gonna facilitate you in building your own dream at the same time? And that's where it's like you're right, yeah. Learn how to write a song, not just play guitar, learn all about this stuff, you know. It's almost like, you know, because the uh artists right now have a lot a lot more power to do things than ever before.

Jeff King 1:26:38

And a lot more responsibilities, social media and keeping up all that stuff. Oh yeah, you know.

Austin Moody 1:26:43

So if you could if you could go back and tell your 20-year-old self something knowing everything you do now, what what would you tell him?

Jeff King 1:26:56

Boy, I would say dig in hard and and just what I said that to the new guys, you know, I would say dig in hard and learn everything you can. You know, technology in when I was twenty isn't the same as it is now, so to learn engineering was a another job. But now with software it's a little easier. You take so many YouTube videos and do all this stuff and learn. And you know, but the the the creative aspect of of the music business is, you know, for me, what I would still learn to play guitar, work hard about it, work hard at it, and try to figure out, you know, be better. And I I would get into the songwriting thing because it's once that opens up, it's pretty creative. I mean, it's incredibly creative. Sure. You know, bike sheet of paper and you get to you come up with whatever at the end of the day, you know. Plus, you know, we in my time, you know, in the you know, 80s, 90s, early 2000s, whatever, I mean, that was big money years because there were big sales years. There was a and you don't think of music as being a product, but it really is a product. You go to a record store and you're doing this. You go down to the shampoo aisle at Kroger and you're doing this. I mean, sure. Everybody's trying to sell I mean, they're you you know, you wanna you want to buy a bottle of prel, you want to uh you know, or whatever, whatever it is, and you want to buy a you know, a Vince Gill record or whatever. I mean I would say, you know, d spread out a little bit and learn more about all that.

Austin Moody 1:28:37

Take away all the creative musician stuff. What would you tell the man personally? The boy, I should say. Yeah. Coming from the man.

Jeff King 1:28:50

Well, you mean I would probably then the next thing for me would be family stuff. You know, I'd try to be a little better husband and dad and son and brother and friend and you know. You know, as you're having your job and your hobby is the same thing, it's it's like a hundred percent. And that's why you work all day sometimes and you don't get to see your family, but and then on weekends, like, what are you doing? Well, I'm going down here to this uh having a you know big convention we're all you know, it's a guitar convention, they're gonna sell guitars, and it's like is that all is that all you think? Yeah, well, kind of you know, this is my hobby today. Monday, I'm gonna be sitting in a chair with headphones on, and that's gonna be my job. You know. So there's so many things, you know. I mean, it's hard to define one thing, but you know, you want to at the end of the day, you you when it's all said and done, you know, I I would like to say I did everything as the best I could being a family man and you know, your relationship with your faith, whatever that may be, and it's just all that stuff. Yeah.

Austin Moody 1:30:10

So being at the top of the game. Like I said, you're one of the most humble guys I know. And a lot of guys, I mean, you get a little bit of notoriety, and a man thinks starts to think he's pretty wise. And it's hard for a man to admit that he's not pretty wise. So what keeps you what keeps you grounded?

Jeff King 1:30:42

Man, you can't listen to that stuff. I mean, it's it's cool when somebody says, boy, that that guy's really good, or whatever, you know, he played really great stuff, or or I like having him on a session, or whatever. And you you uh you know, the thing that we laugh about in our world is some when somebody says, you know what, I've enjoyed you on these last three or four sessions. Uh I'm never going to do another session with F you. And that's when you look at your friends and you go, This was my last session with this guy. Why, I don't know, but sometimes that's the way it is. So you have to expect that, you know. Yeah. I mean, I always think whatever I do, I work as hard as I can and I'll give them a 100%, like him 150%, and I will stay until the last second, you know, whatever. And you know, sometimes things just don't work.

Austin Moody 1:31:38

So I don't know if that answers your question, but yeah, I think it does. And I think you're one, you're one of the rare ones, you know, gut when you know, when little old me has asked you to come out on the road and yep, well, you know, it no, in between, you know, playing Pariba and doing records for the biggest of the big, playing the CMAs, you know, gazillion of times you played on Kelly Clark's on Vegas shows, and then somebody like me calls in, hey man, you want to jump on a plane and go play in BFE New Mexico for a night, and we got a camper as a green room, you're like, Yeah, man, let's go. You know, and so I I appreciate that about you. And and for a young artist like myself and and those times, man, I it made me stand up a little bit more on stage because I'm like, I can't believe I've got Jeff King over here playing guitar.

Jeff King 1:32:36

So you know, if you love it, then you do it.

Austin Moody 1:32:39

Yeah. So I think I think that it goes farther than you think when you do that, and I don't even think you think of that, which is awesome, you know. But it it does it does lift people up when you do do it. So that's pretty cool. So we're gonna wrap it up. What do you you know? I I'm under the belief that men in in the sense of the word are becoming more rare these days in the sense of work ethic, their faith, you know, how they step up as a man in the family household, all the things that that a man was designed and meant to do. What do you what do you what do you think the American hustle means when it I'm not talking just career, not success, not money. Kinda all of it consumed with how a person goes about living his life and purs pursuing his dreams. What does all that mean to you? That's a big question.

Jeff King 1:33:56

You know, as you were asking that, it made me think of first thing I thought of was, you know, when you're a kid, you remember going to church and getting the little what's the thing they hand you when you come in, yeah, the but this call something else. You know, whatever it is, you get it. I remember seeing on the front there was a car, looked like a 60s car, and a dad that had a hat on, and the two kids and the mom, and they were walking in the church. I remember going, is that the perfect American family? Because dad's going to work every day, and mom's, you know. Now that can be shattered a thousand ways because that that uh at some point gets it doesn't get political because it's how I grew up, but peop other people don't believe it like that, and and and that's okay. But for me, I see that as part of the thing to aspire to, like have a have a strong value having strong values and beliefs, and because that's what helps keep you grounded in your sense of right and wrong. And I think it's important to find figure out what you want to do and go. Go forward, you know. If you don't, then what's the point? You know, if you I mean, I I wanted to do this, so I was like you, you know. Just a quick side story is back in the days when I was going to clubs to hear guitar players around. I remember I met like three or four guys, and we'd all end up at the same club listening to this one guitar player. And and we went to dinner, we went to a late night, like at one of the places after having a beer or two at the club. And one of the guys said, Hey, I've got a question that I think we all should answer. Because we're all kind of fringe, pals, and whatever. And he said, He said, So I'll scroll around the table and he said, I'll start with you. And I was like, I think I was the last guy, which is funny because he said, Okay, so what's your plan for the next X amount of time? And the one guy says, Well, when I came here, my plan was to stay five years, and if I'm not doing, you know, what I want to be doing in five years, then I'll probably go back to Virginia and my dad's a real estate guy, and I'll probably do real estate. It's like, okay, and what about the next guy? Well, you know, I'm gonna stay here for two years, and if I don't have, if I'm not out touring, then I'm gonna go do whatever and whatever. And everybody has very similar things, and there's nothing wrong with any of that. You know, if you if you want to be a uh an astronaut and you find out you can't be, you're gonna have to go do something else. So, and as you know, in the music business, you can work as hard as you can work and be as good as you can be, and sometimes you just don't get the break for whatever reason, you know. So it got to me and they said, What are you gonna do? And I was like, whoa. You know, I've never thought about this. I mean, I guess I will never, I mean, I guess I'll just figure out how try to figure out how to how to figure this out. I mean, I had a college degree and the other guys did too, uh, if I remember correctly, but I'm like, the college degree helped me think. Helped me sort out problems and think better. You know, I mean, I learned how to do drafting and all that stuff too, but I learned how to solve problems. So I thought, well, I mean, boy, I I don't I don't know. I guess I won't know until I don't what po what point do you is do you get there and you go, okay, I'm done. I mean, everyone has their different point, being said. So their American hustle is a hustle, hustle, hustle, and if you and find out what you love to do so it's not work, you know.

Austin Moody 1:38:02

I mean where mo b motivation ends, discipline has to kick in and take you the rest of the way. And it's not going to be perfect. Because if it doesn't happen five years, it's like, well, we guess it didn't happen.

Jeff King 1:38:14

Or is it getting ready to happen because of all the five years of work you've hard hard you put in, you know? Uh that's just that's everybody's personal question at the end of the day for themselves. But, you know, for me, the American hustle, it's just finding what you like to do and figuring out how to do it, and then figuring out how to monetize it, and then, you know, doing the right thing with the money, helping out people, and and and if you're so inclined to go to church, go in church and try to be a better person. However, yeah, however, all that is.

Austin Moody 1:38:48

So love it, man. Yeah. Well, thank you. Yep. I know you got about 15 or 20 or 30 songs to play on, so they will let you get back to work. All right. Wow, it's been fun. Jeff King has proved that mastering your craft is good, but building freedom is better. Music gave him a platform, but ownership gave him a future. Whatever you're building, your career, your business, your family, remember this. Skill gets you in the door. Discipline keeps you there. Until next time, stay hungry, stay sharp, and stay free. I'm Austin Moody, and this is American Hustle.