How The Middle Of Nowhere Is What Got Me Somewhere

has gone on since the last podcast I have. Of course, the holiday season, I had hey documentary that came out called They Were There, which I'm very proud of. And we've been making some new music which I'm so excited to play you guys very soon. Can't do it today, but very soon. But I do have some loose ends to tie up on that last episode fourteen. I have to finish that story. I have to talk about the current tour that I'm on. I have to talk about what I think twenty nineteen is going to bring to

you from me. Here we go. I'm in Norman, Oklahoma today. It is a Saturday in the parking lot. I'm in the back of my bus wild Flower, and it is really cold. It's like nineteen degrees outside, which is cold for a Central Texas boy. We are at the University of Oklahoma and we're playing in the basketball arena on the Cane Brown Lift Forever Tour. And this is for me right now, the end of the second week of this tour. And I'll tell you what. This has been

a really really good tour for me. I have theories on why it's so good. And fan wise, this has been the loudest compared to Florida Georgia Line Tour that I was on two years ago and then last year the Luke Bryan Tour, this has been the loudest, fans, the most accepting, the most people in their seats when I start, I'm talking sold out everyone in their seat. That's the testament to EE nation. That's also a testament to Cane Round fans that don't know me, that hopefully

do now what a blast this has been. Let me talk about this documentary. It's called they Were There, a Heroes documentary, and I've taken a lot of time to make this documentary. It took about three years and the concept of it goes way beyond that. It goes back all the way to two thousand and seven when I took my first entertainment tour in Iraq. After coming back from that tour, I was so motivated. I wanted to

go to Iraq and play music. And I think I've talked about this in a previous podcast, but I wanted to bring a little piece of home to the soldiers to tell them thank you for allowing me to play music. But what I got out of it was so much more. What I got was this vision of who these men and women are, what they're doing twenty four to seven, no breaks, no holidays. The sacrifice became real to me when I saw it over there in the desert. So I came back and immediately wanted to go and go

back to Iraq again. So I went back two more times. I went back twice in two thousand and eight. One of those was a Christmas in New Year's When I got home to Texas after that third trip to Iraq, I was motivated to bring that feeling that I had that was an addicting feeling, to help out the cause,

to say thank you to these men and women. And I wanted other civilians to feel that same thing that I had, So I decided on a whim, you know, one crazy day, that I was going to walk one hundred miles in combat boots over the course of five days from South Austin up to Fort Hood, Texas. I

had never done anything like this. It just, you know, I just thought, you know, we'll walk one hundred miles and I'll create awareness and morale and patriotism and say thank you and raise some money for a charity called Boot Campaign for returning Soldiers re entering civilian life. That was so fun that first Boot walk. We had so many volunteers that came out and walked with me. I

camped on the side of the road. It went along along with a song that I had called Sleeping on the Intercede at the time, and that led the year two. That year led the year three, and year four. I did that four years in a row where I walked one hundred miles from South Austin up to Fort Hood. But after the fourth time, I lost my dad. He died of a heart attack in March twenty fourteen, and it changed my perspective on a lot of things. It changed the way I looked at heroes because my dad

was my hero. And when he died, I felt like that would die along with him, that what made him a hero would be lost, and I wanted to retell that story, and I realized that I really couldn't, and I wanted to tell everybody, the whole world, what he

meant to me. It was through that grieving process that really opened my eyes to fallen soldiers, the heroes that they were, and that if I felt like that about my dad, who was my hero, how should we feel as Americans about soldiers, fallen soldiers that died volunteering to protect our freedom, to allow us to live the American dream? How did those families feel that have lost that soldier, forgotten, lost,

unable to tell the world who this man or woman was. Probably, Yeah, that was the perspective I had, And so I thought, you know what, this one hundred mile walk that I've done for four years needs to change a little bit. I want to I want to honor soldiers. You know. My first thought was to honor one hundred fallen soldiers one per mile. And I was talking to one of my friends, a wounded warrior himself named Joey Jones, and

I was excited. I said, I want to honor a hundred soldiers and walk one hundred miles and each mile marker will represent one soldier. And he said, man, I appreciate your inspiration, but let me be honest with you. I think you would be better suited to represent five soldiers one each day. That way you could you could really concentrate on who they were, the lives that they lived, and spend an entire day talking about the soldier that

he was right. It was a great idea. And so what I wanted to do was not know anything about a soldier and learn about them during the course of the day. So the families would send me a care package, letters, anything that I needed to know about this soldier that would would let me understand more about the hero that they were, the lives that they lived, the hometowns, the mothers, the wives, the families, the brothers, the friends. And that's

what we did. I decided to go to West Texas Big Ben National Park, a place I had never been as a Texan, went out there and picked five days and walked about the still the equivalent of one hundred miles. Even though it was more of a hike and it was a religious experience for me, it was unbelievable, and

we filmed a documentary. This all started when I went to social media and asked for gold Star families to submit their stories, and we got over three hundred submissions of fallen soldiers and we had to go through and pick five, which was difficult. And it wasn't like we went and picked the most dramatic, craziest stories. We decided to pick five stories that represented the whole, that represented the greater group, which was very difficult. It was including

one suicide. It was very appropriate to add a suicide to this list because that's a big part of fallen soldiers today with PTSD. And so we took these names and I stayed away from anything beyond the name until that day in Big Ben. I'd wake up, I would call the family. Sometimes it was a wife, sometimes it was a father, a mother, and I would FaceTime them and I would just tell them how excited I was to start the day and that this day would be all about their son or husband. And I learned, as

the viewer learned, just who they were. And I'm so proud of this film. I hope that a lot of y'all have watched it. If you haven't, I also made this as easy as possible to watch. It's not subscription based. You don't have to pay for it. You don't have to do anything but go to YouTube and search Granger Smith. They Were There, a hero's documentary. It's for free, and I wanted it to be like that. I wanted it to be where everyone if they wanted to check this out.

It's about forty five minutes long. I wanted you to go and be able, on your own time, on your own couch at your own house, to go to YouTube and check this out. And I encourage you to watch three or four minutes. And I hope that if you just dedicate three or four minutes to it, then you're gonna get sucked into it and ended up watching the entire film and then let me know what you think.

It's a very very important project to me. I've been playing the theme song called They Were There that I wrote with some of my great friends, including Mitchell Timpenny and an awesome artist himself. I've been playing that song live when this came round tour, and last night when we played it in Memphis, it just kind of kind of brought the house down. It was just crazy, everyone lifting up their phones and the lights on their phones.

And it's a powerful song with a different message than any other soldier song, because this is from the civilian perspective. This is a song about while we were here, living our lives, doing these mundane things, all the while, there are people over there right now paying for this freedom. Here's a song called they were there. We were here, blowing out birthdaycads, riding our bikes, jumping in legs, feeling butterflies on our first dates, and stealing our old man's beard.

We were here back home and the home and the bridge, but the breath ain't home. There's been notion away doing their job and keeping us safe. While we were here, they were there, fighting back on the front line, strapping up their boots before the sun rites, keeping their mamas up full night in field. They were there in the name of a hometown of the last name that was passed down every day, every night, every moment we were here,

they were there. They were there. We were here, singing the floods of the league and repeating those words, not knowing their meaning, taking for granted all our freedoms in the land of the free. We were here bitching batmanimum wage, splitting ourselves in the Red and Blue states, we still sat down hot food on the plate. Yeah hour, we were here. They were there, fatting back on the front lines, coming up their boots before the sunrise, keeping the marbles

up at night in seeing. They were there in the name of a hotwn of the last name that was passed down every day, every night, every morning. We were here. They were there. They were there. They were there, given everything, man, God, they were there. Some came home in a pine wood box with those stars and strips on top. They were there, fatting back on the fun line, scrapping out there Bruce before the sun lights, keeping their mama's up phone nine feed.

They were there in the name of a hometown, of a last name that was passed down every day, every night of the malling we working. They were there. They were there, and you can watch this full documentary on YouTube. Just searched. They were there. Granger Smith, I hope you like it, and please give me your feedback. It's important to me. Hey, thank you for listening to this podcast. If you want to help, if you want to hear more of these, then I'll tell you exactly how you

could help. Me, tell your friends about it, and go on at whatever streaming device you're using. Give it a good rating. That helps me. This podcast is brought to you by EEEE Energy. That's my official, unofficial energy drink. I'm actually drinking one right now and I will be tonight before the show. As I always like to point out, this is an energy drink that my brothers and I made from scratch. We took several different recipes and we

kind of decided the best one for us that we liked. Actually, people were asking me last night was it taste like Red Bull or Mass And I said, it's not tanging like Red Bull, and it's not as fruity as Monster. I like to think that it's just right the Goldilocks drink. Check it out at eye energy dot com or Amazon Prime. At the end of episode fourteen, and by the way, I'm still kind of telling my story of where I came from and how I got to where I am now,

and it's collectively through all these past episodes. So if you're brand new to this podcast and you're just starting right now with episode fifteen, you might have to catch up just a little bit, because at the end of episode fourteen, the timeline of the story I was telling was in about twenty eleven, and I was talking about how I put out a record called Poets and Prisoners. I was very proud of it. I still love that album.

It's still such a time piece for me at the time and where I was in my life, as all my albums are, but that particular one wasn't doing great. It wasn't getting a lot of attention. I think people liked it, but they did not a lot of people knew about it, and no one really bought it, and no one was coming to the shows. It wasn't translating to ticket sales, and all that was about to change with one show. And that's how I ended episode fourteen,

was saying that, and that is true. Now three things were about to happen for me in this twenty eleven window. These are three major things that started moving my career at a rapid pace. Number One, I recorded a live record. It was in College Station, Texas, one of my favorite old historic bars called the Dixie Chicken. I decided to call it Live at the Chicken. I was so nervous

about this because you only get one chance. But I had my entire band travel with me to a hotel in the middle of nowhere the night before, just so that they wouldn't go party too hard and be too hungover to play a good record. It might have been overkill, but they did really good, and I was really proud

of how this record turned out. I mean, we brought all this gear and recording stuff into this little bitty wooden bar and packed it out with some of our best fans that knew exactly what we were doing that day, and just have a really good memory and an album to show for it. And still to this day, it's the only live album I've ever done. I didn't know it then, but that album Live at the Chicken That kind of marks the end of an era for me,

because things were changing rapidly for me. I was writing songs. As I talked about in at the end of episode fourteen, I had talked to a couple of indie rock record labels that wanted to sign me. And when I really thought about everything and kind of dove into where I was in my career, I realized I could possibly be on a misleading path. I was a country artist. I loved country music, and that's what I wanted to do.

And so it was time to solidify myself as a country music artist without a shadow of a doubt, to make sure that my music and my lyrics screamed country, because that's who I was. And I could pinpoint the exact time when all of that became very real to me in my head. It's because I was at a place when I was ready to write songs. I was ready for a new album. I was ready for the granger that was going to bust through, that was going

to finally have a lot of fans. And so I was in that mindset and we played this show at private party. It was in the middle of nowhere. The closest town was bass Drop, Texas, but it was still about fifty miles from bass Drop, And it was this tiny dance hall that was used only for private parties. And there was no bars, there was no hockey tonks, there was no dance halls open to the public anywhere near this place. And during the party, one of these guys was talking to me and I said, man, what

do you around here? What do you guys do for fun? What do you I mean, where do you go? And I'm thinking, where do you go drink beer? You know you. Where do you go? Dance with the girls? And it shows. It just shows that I had been touring so long in this van and trailer, I'd been beating up this honky tonk circuit that I had forgotten my roots. I had forgotten what I did in high school. I've forgotten what I did in college. All I knew was where I was currently playing, and that was so ingrained in

my mind. This guy looked at me like I was crazy, and he said, where do we go? We do it in the field, in the little Betty town between min dots. We don't tell get in a parking lot. We bump down their roads and jack dump trucks. Far from the bars and smoky nightclubs. We do it in a field, rocking all night until the sun comes up. We got a hundred blue Cans sitting all ice on the back of my club and George Stream playing it in a chevro Laine. We're opening on the doors wide and let

it play. We do it in a field, rocking all night until the sun comes up. A few days for that conversation, I wrote, we do it in the field, And to whoever that was that I talked to that day, you, sir, saved my life. And you know, in this business, in

this career, it has taken several times. There's many times like this in my life where I needed to get hit in the head with a hammer to remember just what the hell I'm supposed to be doing, because as all of us, in all of our lives, we can get so micro focused on what we think is right. And as they say, you could start climbing the ladder and then once you get to the top, you realize the ladder was leaning on the wrong building. That's kind of what I was doing. So thank you, buddy for

clocking me in ahead. I needed that. One Are we Doing in a Field? Ended up being the exact identity that I was stepping into, and it would soon be the lead single off of a brand new project of mine. So all I had was this song, and so many of the other songs off of what would become Dirt Road Driveway kind of started falling into my lap I was, I was writing them, and in the meantime, as I was kind of recording and getting ready, Tyler and I my brother who's my manager still is still the best

manager in country music. He might get mad if I say that the best manager in music, he would probably prefer. But we're going over ways to launch the new me, the you know, the how do we launch outside of our small, tiny region that we're living in. How do we become more than just poets and prisoners? How do

we reach people? So we had a vision of going viral on YouTube and not you know, no one wanted to see me sit there and talk on YouTube, So we wanted to do some serious stuff, some of the stuff from Bootwalk in Iraq, some music videos, and some funny videos. And a lot of the funny videos although it's me is you know in the video it's Tyler uh with the vision and what's you need about some of these funny videos that we started doing was that they if you notice, they don't play any music at all.

It's just it's some kind of silly skit and at the end it just tags really quick grangersmith dot com, so that if it goes viral and it spreads, then people would ultimately say that's kind of funny. Well is there more? Oh there's a website, click on that. Oh it's a musician and he sings songs and hopefully that you like them. You know that was the goal, and we set our sights on one million views. That was

so far then past anything we had ever done. We'd put out a lot of videos up until this point, but nothing even close to a million, But that was the goal. We knew it was going to take one million views on YouTube to make a dent remotely and to even think about going back and relating to the music. So that's what we wanted, and that's what we dug our heels into. And if you search YouTube for me, you could find all kinds of old videos, like Live with Lionel. That was a really funny one. I thought

that was really funny. He says a super awkward interview guy, and it didn't get it didn't get a whole lot of exposure. We had a Mexican restaurant owner named Freddie, and I loved Freddy. I still love Freddy. I think he's an absolute rock star. I actually think we're going to see more from Freddy in the future. But he didn't get a lot of views. We had Don't Touch the Turtles, which is this old redneck guy that has an affinity for saving sea turtles. We like that one.

I thought that was funny. Once again didn't get that many views, and we had Cribs. We had an episode of Cribs where I'm in this old, broke down house, and that one did pretty good. Actually, that didn't get close to a million. I think it has over a million now, but back then it was kind of another slow growth video. All this was leading into what you guys are probably thinking. Yes, what you're thinking is right.

I didn't know it. But during this time, during this experimental time filming a lot of videos, usually Tyler be on the camera and I would take the footage and go back on my little laptop and edit all these by myself. I was barreling towards a huge career explosion and things. That might be an understatement, because things absolutely blew up for me because of what we were about to do. And as far as I know, it was such a simple idea. As far as I know, it was just a voice that I had. I had talked

in this voice. Tyler called it the country guy, and he represented some family members of mine, you distant cousins. We had some friends that talked like this. We interacted with bar owners and the honky Tonk circuit that were like this guy. And he was kind of a combination of all of them put together. But what he became and what we shot that day out there at my parents'

place in Central Texas changed everything for me. In fact, it's probably the reason you're listening to this podcast is because somewhere along the line, the chain reaction started with this video. It's crazy. All right, don't get mad at me.

You're gonna get mad at me. But I'm going to end the podcast here because this next episode, episode sixteen, has a lot of information and I want to dedicate the whole thing to it because it was a part of my career that I like to call an intentional accident. We knew exactly what we were doing. We wanted a million views on YouTube. We knew exactly how to do that. We just didn't know that this was going to be the way that did it. And I'll tell you all

about it next episode. Happ Inside out of the Blue scat in last Yeah, when it happenside nothing to you, Judy, even dude, the keeper round til the moon goes down in your back at your house, one thing with another, you love each other when looking you never look back. It happens like that Thanks for listening. If you want to support me or any other artist, the best way is to see us on tour. Go to grangersmith dot com backslash tour, See you down the road.