Pat you guys, what's up? Before we jump into a story that's one of the lowest moments of my musical career, A story worth telling with a message worth hearing at the end of the story, it's a happy ending, and promise. Before I get into that, I want to tell you that this is the moment, this right here today, as you watch, listen, wherever you are in the world, this is the moment for me when I say, I'm so excited to tell you I have new music out right now.
We just announced a brand new album that comes out September twenty fifth. It's called The Country Things, Volume one. And as a little side note, as you can imagine, if it says volume one, there's probably going to be a volume two. We'll announce that later. But right now, what I'm worried about telling you is the album is announced. It comes out September twenty fifth. Two songs are out right now, two brand new songs. It's called One of them is called Country Things. The other one is called
Hate You Like I Love You. I love both of these songs. I'm excited. They're both very different in their own right Country Things Is. You can't compare the two they're very different. They live in the same family, but they're very different content wise, stylistically, the same family content wise, two completely different stories. And I'm interested to see what you think. If you want to comment below, if you're watching on YouTube, comment below and tell me what you
think of these two songs. And you can find them anywhere you find music, anywhere you find music, wherever your favorite place to listen to music is, whether that's YouTube or Spotify, or Amazon or Pandora or Apple Music, your friend's garage, wherever you listen to music, wherever you find music, these days, you could find these two songs. And here's what I'm gonna ask you guys to do as fans of this podcast, as listeners of this podcast, there's a
couple caught actions that you could do to help. On Apple Music, you could pre ad so you can go and pre add the whole album Country Things, Volume one. On Spotify, you could pre save. On the iTunes store, you could pre order, and on Amazon Music you could
pre order. So if you do that, I say, you have a Spotify account and you go and you pre saved my album, or you have an Apple Music account and you go and pre add my album that matters, that puts it into this little statistic that then the people at Spotify or Apple Music or Amazon and Pandora, that those people see it and they go, oh, the people really like this album. We better push it up so more people could hear it. It's important push it
out there. That's how that algorithm works. And so first and foremost, before I get into this podcast, I want to tell you about that. I hope, at the very least, the very least, if you don't want to do anything, if you don't want to pre save it or pre add it or pre order it, or least, I just hope you give it a chance and you listen to it. You listen to give Me a verse and chorus, Listen to a verse and chorse of country Things, Listen to a verse and chorus of hate you like I love you.
If you dig it, if you want to hear more, follow the lead here. But I just hope that you could relate to these songs. I hope that the stories speak to you. I hope it matters to you like it matters to me, because then that that that fulfills me as a musician more than anything. If songs are speaking to people and messages are getting out and people can relate, connect to a story or a melody. It makes it feel all worth it, It really does. Thank
you for listening to the podcast. I'm bringing back my old drummer, my current Geegee Apparel warehouse manager Caleb Kelly. He has an amazing story. We had some really low times professionally and in our friendship. He brought it all around full circle. God brought it around full circle if you believe that, which I do. And then he saw the silver lining, the happy ending, the light at the end of the tunnel. Everything came back to him. Now he's not perfect, he's not out of the woods. He's
not absolutely wonderfully happy. No one is. But he came out of a really, really dark place and found his way back to life again. And that's the message I want you to hear today. Welcome to the podcast, Episode forty seven. Ye Ye did chant in DC, moun Times and school long Line, I'm fool up and Down going back Rangy co watch evage, Yeah the gation. First thing I'll say is if you if you're new to this podcast, you got to stop right now, don't listen or watch
this one and go back to episode forty six. It's called I called the Cops of My Drummer. Watch that. Listen to that one, and then come back and then meet us back here, because I want you to get the backstory on Kyle Kelly and the way that I ended that when I called the Cops of My Drummer, which is true story, not clickbait. I called the cops of my drummer, which was you a crazy night in Flagstaff, Arizona.
I tell that whole story, why it happened, and as you mentioned yesterday here at Eue Apparel, that it's nice to tell that story so that people know the full the full circle of what happened that night. It wasn't just you were crazy, you got drunk and you had a crazy night and things turned bad. It was a lot more to it, and so we were able on episode forty six to go through all those details. But the problem with episode forty six is the way I ended it, and I didn't even really realize that I
ended it the way I did. But a lot of people listened to that. That was a very popular episode, and this is the first time I've ever followed up with an episode the next week with the same guest. But the problem with that episode is was I ended it with the cliffhanger, not meaning to saying that everything you've heard so far wasn't as bad as what was to come. That finally got Caleb Kelly out of the band, and I had to bring you back to talk about that.
So bad the story glad to me because it's also interesting that, yes, this incident, this incident we're about to talk about, got you out of the band, not the one that I called the cops on. But the crazy thing is is that you still work for us, with us every day. I see you more than my current drummer, Dusty. Yeah, because I see you every day. You're the warehouse manager here at EE Apparel, and that that incident, which was you know, you started playing drums for me in twenty twelve.
So a lot has happened in eight years, the evolution of us as friends, and it's a really cool story. So thank you for being back. Two weeks in a row. I literally pulled you out of the warehouse. You were completely sweating because it's hot in here. We have this fall launch coming up next a couple of weeks September eighteenth and so you've been getting all the backstories, you've been getting all the palettes of new merch coming in through the shipments, and so this is the this is
the go time for you. The shippers will have hell on it's eighteenth, but you have hell right now getting everything out organized, right, trying to say one step ahead of what they need before they get the order out the door. So yeah, we've got a lot of boxes and pallets and items coming in. So no air conditioning in the warehouse, No, No, it's you experience the elements. Yeah, yeah, it's good though I had a change shirt because it
was a little Norley. You clean up nice. So before we get into the night, that ended us playing music together at least for now, as there might be more a lot more music down the road, but for now. There's other stories that happened to that I kind of wanted to bring up, and there might be some of them forgetting, but I wanted to bring up one eared Doug. One ear Doug. That was do you want to take anywhere?
I'll set it up. But I can't finish it because I was technically sleeping in the van back in the day when we were pushing back every Saturday night when we would play a show, me and the band would push back that same night to try to make it home, and we were most of the time successful. We would get home usually by the time the sun was coming up, no matter where we were coming from in the state of Texas or Oklahoma, we would get back home or ride around sunrise. And if we beat the sun coming up,
that was a good Saturday night. It was good. If we got home at nine or ten am, it was devastating. It was so tiring. But what we would do was we would switch off driving and we would pick our drivers after the show, no before the show, so we knew how much alcohol we can consu Originally it was after the show, and then we noticed that if you just got hammered, you couldn't be a driver for the first right, So we were like, this isn't going to work. We we'll pick it before the show. So we used
everything from driver's license to hotel keys. I remember doing hotel keys and we would write our names on them and put them up in the visor of the van, and then before the show we would just draw names. Like a car dealer in Vegas. We would draw in pairs so We would say, all right, Shift one is Todd and Caleb. Shift two Granger and Tyler, whatever, and we would pick usually about four shifts. It depended on how far we were driving the shifts. We were very
strict about it. There were two hour shifts. You and your partner would pick who was going to drive and who was going to navigate. The only rule was the navigator could not sleep at all, could not sleep, and you could switch. You could switch off ten minute shifts. It didn't matter you picked. You had your two hour slot, which is by design the length of a movie. Yeah, in case you wanted to watch a movie and everyone else could just chill out, they could watch the movie,
they could sleep. The first shift was amazing. You're fresh off the stage, you've loaded the trailer, hit the road, drive for two hours. You're done. Second shift was terrible because just when two hours goes by after loading the trailer in two hours on the road was like just the time when you start getting tired. It takes two hours just to get tired, so you could get tired. And then third shift wasn't bad because now you've rested
for four hours. You've been bumping around in the back in the bunk in the back of the van and you kind of want to drive anyway. Yeah, this particular night, I believe we were in Schneider, Texas. That's the town I remember that we played no that we were driving to one year Doug. Yeah, where were that RV sign?
Big Bread. What we did in the middle of the night was we always when we needed a pea stop, because you got, what were seven of us, probably seven or eight five yeah, seven exactly, so seven of us. There was multiple pea stops that we had to do, but we didn't. It wasn't worth going to a gas station just to pee. It just took too long, find a parking spot, there could be a line, somebody's gonna take too long because they're buying something in the aisles.
So it was way easier to do what we called a desert pea basically because most of Texas is the desert. We would just pull off on the side and the darkness and everyone would pile out and just pee in the grass. That's just how it was. So here we are, I'm setting the scene for your story. We're outside of Snyder, Texas, I believe, on a random Saturday night, pushing home stop for a desert pee. I was not on shift, so
I was in the middle bench trying to sleep. You never really sleep, but I was trying to sleep and the guys get out to go pee, and I believe it was you and Tyler on the shift. No, it was it was Tyler and Johnny. You weren't okay. I was on the first bench asleep right there where the door had opened. Gotcha, gotcha. So during this desert pea we meet one eared Doug. So what happened was here's
here's where it picks up for me. I'm like laying with my feet facing towards the sliding door and I hear this, like like sit up real quick, and there's some dude had bent his truck around one of those like double poles. It holds up one of those big signs, and uh, I jump out. Tyler and Johnny are there, and I was like, let's go. I don't know why I wasn't wearing shoes. I realized once I got there. But we run over to this truck. You were barefoot. Yeah,
that's the first time I hear that. Yeah, it was dumb. I only remember because there was glass everywhere, but it was like, you know, like it wasn't It didn't cut my feet, thank god. But we go over there and uh, we say, this is the middle of nowhere, boy, yeah, Black Texas, nut town, inside middle of nowhere, middle up two am. Yeah it was like that. Yeah, it was early and my first week with you guys. This was
the after the last show, our first week. So he wraps his truck around this pole, run over there, Uh, to the driver's side and pull open the door and obviously not wearing a seatbelt because here's the driver's side and he's all the way up against that window, kind of leaned up against there. And I go in there and I grab his arm. I'm like okay, you okay, and he looks at me and he's just like because he had broken his jaw and it was like back and hanging down to the side. And uh, that wasn't
the worst part though. Uh. The other part was his ear was hanging off and there was only like a little bit. It was like down here. So I grabbed him like, car, you're all right, and he kind of like, well, I can't. He's not saying anything. I mean he might have been saying something. Yeah, I couldn't tell what he was saying, because the jow was broken and his ears hanging off his head and he was like, ah, and that was one ear Doug. We so his name wasn't Doug,
but you named him Doug. Yeah, one ear Doug. If his name is Doug, that would be kind of cool. Yeah, nailed it, but it's probably not Doug. So I don't think one year Doug's listening to this podcast. If you are buddy, First of all, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to laugh at you. But at the same time, I think we might have saved your life. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know what would have happened. I mean, he was just I don't think he was bleeding out too bad.
He was just laying up against I mean, maybe he would have. And and to set the scene too, it was we're on this two lane highway in the middle of Texas, but this and the guys are peeing off the two lane highway. But this happened in the service road where the where the billboard was. So I mean, of all places to be standing there peeing in the middle of nine on side of the road, of all places for a drunk driver to come flying down the service road and wreck. It was right here, in the
middle of nowhere. So at that point he had just got in a fight with his with his girl, right, yeah, he had. He had left like stormed out. We found out later, well, he wrapped his truck around there. We pulled him out, pull him out, and he's like, it's hanging. And then some car pulls up and uh, I don't know if it was his daughter or his significant other, but she's like, he's he's okay, he's he's fine, he's fine. I was like, I don't think so she's like, no,
he's fine, he'll come with me. He's fine with the truck was fine. And I was like, man, I really don't think he's okay, and she's like, no, trust me, he's fine. I'll take him with me. It's not a big deal. And I was like, look at him, and she looks at him and he's ah, and she just she was like, oh, christ upped up and starts crying
and she so she didn't see him until you said that. No, she probably saw his good side, okay, And then he turned around and the ears just dangling there and his jaws all bode So then she was like then she started crying. But then like the cops showed up. Uh you remember the cops circle. I don't know who called
the cops. Uh must have been so I bet you Tyler called him, probably because remember then city cops showed up and they were like, uh, what's outside the city And then dude that was a mess share office showed up and was like, it's not my jurisdiction neither. Yeah, So then DPS showed up. He was not in the mood to be there. All they called. They said, you're right, and that guy said, it's not it's not my jurisdiction.
So then they called DPS. But remember it took him an hour to get there because he was asleep and there was one Texas State trooper available in that county and he was asleep, so they had to call him wake him up because he was the only guy that could. I don't know all you police officers listening, I don't know what it is he had to do, but he had to get his eyes on the scene. Yeah. I don't know how what who, like whose responsibility it was, but they were like the city was like, it's not us,
it's county. County was like it's not us, it's DPS. And then DPS was gonna show up. But the Sheriff's office dude was like, he said, okay, what happened? We were like, all right, Well he wrapped his truck around this thing. We pulled him out and we saw and he was like holding this. I'll never he's just holding his bad He's like zero, yeah, very matter of fact. Zero got that point holding Yeah, yeah, I got it. Yeah, I already knew that. Picked up on that. Uh yeah,
that was interesting. So we had to stay as a band. By this time, we're all up. Anyone else that was asleep is now up. And like I said, we always wanted to push back and make make home before the sun came up. Well, we had to stay for the DPS officer to arrive because we were the only witnesses and they needed to get a statement from us. And there was, as you know, you've probably been in a situation before, there's no getting out of this making a statement.
You know. As much as we wanted to just go okay, you got it, were no. We had to wait. We had to wait for the DPS to fill up the report, and that took an hour for him just to get there, because I think he lived forty five minutes away, plus give him fifteen minutes to wake up and put his clothes on, and then he gets there. Then you guys had to tell the whole story again again to him, and it set us back a good two hours. Just stopping to pee one time set us back two hours
and get us home late. But if you if you're Ever, if you're listening to this podcast and you're Ever in Snyder, Texas, walking around and you see a man, middle aged, kind of thin, one ear might be and one ear, one ear looks a little bit different, like maybe it's been reattached with some stitches, just go introduce yourself, say hey, are you one ear? Doug. He doesn't even know that this podcast is exist, but probably not listen. If he is, it's with one earbud or one headphone. He listens to
podcasts with one here one ear muff. Think they're talking about me. All right, we'll take a quick break. We'll be right back. More things to tell you guys about Right now. We have the Yee Apparel Fall launch coming up September eighteenth. So excited about this launch. This is September what an incredible month for ye Apparel. We have
the album Country Things coming out September twenty fifth. We have a brand new YEE Nation website which we are going to announce very soon that it's a member's only website that's going to be very exclusive. And then we have the Ye Apparel Fall Lunch coming out on September eighteenth. This Fall Lunch is probably going to be our biggest
launch ever. And I say that because as we've led into these from the spring to the eye ee Day, to the summer launch now the Fall Lunch in twenty twenty, they've gotten progressively more and more exclusive, more and more popular. The reason this is almost a warning for the podcast listeners that it by ten am when we put this
on sale on ye apparel dot com or ee dot com. Also, they're gonna go fast, and we're gonna have some exclusive merch from really really well thought out pieces for ee apparel, hats and shirts and merchandise, and it's gonna go quickly.
So make sure put on your phones, put on your calendar on September eighteenth that at ten am you're gonna want to log into this website EE dot com or eye Apparel dot com and get what you want, because I don't want you to go there and go I want a large of this and you click and it says sold out and you're gonna be disappointed. I'm really excited about it. This has some awesome merch. So we'll see you guys fall on September eighteenth. I'm sure there's a lot more stories that we could tell one of
these days. On another podcast, we chased a lot of no, I wouldn't say chased, but we've followed a lot of drunk drivers at three four o'clock in the morning just because we're out, we're in our van and we would see something, you know, see a guy swerving all over the place, and so it would kind of be almost something to do for us to call it in and we would just we would be heading west on some road and just keep just keep on going until finally
someone arrived. And that was always some excitement, and we have there's just so many stories that happened in the middle of the night, and when you're a band traveling, you see them and that kind of includes you. Yeah, my drummer and I want to tell the story about
the final night of us playing music together. The story I was talking about in the last episode, and we had had I also want to slightly defend myself that I wasn't just cutting you off, because we had a lot of events like Flagstaff, none that bad, but we had, you know, several occasions where we had to kind of sweep things under the rug because we did it in front of a club owner or a promoter or a radio person, and and you went off the handle on
something because of your current mental state. And we had just we were in a good place at this time, right, we had arrived at a a good time in your life and your mental health. And I can't say enough that if you haven't heard the previous episode, you got to you got to listen to that because I don't want to explain it all again. But you had been through a bunch. You'd had a lot of loss in
your life. You lost your two brothers, which which is it is your life, you know, when you have your brothers, that is your life, and you lost it, and you were on a road to recovery, and you were in a good place, the best place that I had known you, and everyone felt great about it, and then this night happened. Yeah, yeah, I'd even been i'd been going to see a grief counselor, and I'll never forget that on this day, I went to go see this grief counselor and I was like
smiling and just in a good mood. And then she was like, yeah, you're smiling. I was like, I feel good. Yeah, I feel good. I'm comfortable enough to say that today I feel good and she was like, that's good. It's really it's good to hear You've been even working on this for months. So oddly enough, that was that was the day right after I've said I feel good today, I'm I'm hopeful. So that was is it Tuesday or Wednesday? It was a Tuesday. We were supposed to roll out
today the next day for our run that week. And so I leave that grief counselor in a super happy mood, hopeful, and got home. And I'm not going to get into the details of what happened or what I discovered because because the kids are are old enough to maybe find this, and I don't think you know, you never want someone making fun of or making light of your parent, Like is I don't want the kids too? You know, you
wouldn't want someone making fun of your kids parents. Even if you don't, even if you don't like that person or you don't have the best opinion of that person, you know you need to step back and think of like, how would this affect the kids. So it's with that thought in mind that I'm not going to go over details, but I'll just say that it was bad enough to where that the betrayal was bad enough to where that
was that was it for me. You know your marriage was going to come to an end because of this event that happened. Yes, and that's that's we just won't discuss the event. Yeah, I'm no, And that's I'm okay with saying something happened and that marriage is over, and I'll leave it at that out of respect for my kids, because you know, you can't dog your kids. You can't dog the other if you're a part of a divorce family, you can't dog the other person in front of your kids.
That doesn't do anything for them. In fact, it damages them. And it doesn't matter for this story. It doesn't matter. What matters to this story is how you reacted to that event that eventually led to your divorce exactly so that happened or I get home, I leave uh and and just and I'm just like, I gotta get out of here, go somewhere. I just got to go somewhere. This is a there's a lot to process what was going on in my mind at that time, which suck because I just walked out of that uh, out of
that counselor's office, thinking I'm happy, I'm smiling. She had just noticed that I was smiling and I hadn't done that for I had been going to there for a while. So then to come home and just and it was out of the blue, like it was one of those I didn't I didn't see it coming at all. So I was just like, I got to get out of here, and I take off and just start driving west. I don't I don't know where I was going west ish northwest is ish, I guess, and uh, you know, admittedly
start started drinking along the way. I was just my mind was blown at at at what had what I just discovered. And on top of like the boys, because it wasn't too far down road that I discovered this, So it was a lot to try and process. I just got to a place where I was like I'm getting better. And then this it was like coming out of the water, you know, coming out of cold ocean water where you're drowning and your head gets above the surface and someone's there with a pot of boiling water.
It's like it didn't didn't get any better, it was another into another bad situation. So so, yeah, I just started driving, and you're probably going to Colorado. Yeah, somewhere in your mind, you were driving northwest to Colorado from Texas. Yeah, I was. I was going to go either to I was going to go to mountains, you know that. So that was mine. I still don't know if this is going on. And we're leaving the next day to go
on a tour. Yeah, and there has been times many times in my career when I have to kind of straddle friendship and managing several men as employers. It's employees, and this was a this was a big one for me. So so then you arrive in Abilene, Texas, right, Yeah. All along the way, I wasn't going to Abilene. Uh, it wasn't my target, and but I was. I was heading somewhere and along the way, I I had called and talked to you a couple of times and called and talked to my dad mm hmm, and uh, I
didn't listen to his warning. He's like, you need to stop what you're doing. Find a hotel. I'll get your hotel wherever you're at, and you stop stop driving. You're going to get arrested, You're going to get in trouble. Something's going to happen. You need to stop. And I didn't listen to him. I made things worse, like what we were talking about. And your poor dad has always given you sound advice, the right advice, many many times, and I was always like, well, but what if I
do it my way? And it has never never worked out? Uh. So, Yeah, I called to talk to you and I remember telling you and uh, this is when you yelled at me for what I just said. You yelled at me stop being my boss and just be my friend. Because I was like, dude, come back. You know we leave tomorrow for tour. If we could talk this out, we could work this out on the road, you know, with your brothers, with your team, Like, stop being my boss and just be my friend and listen to me. Yeah. I took
that on some levels. You're right the way I took it was that you were more concerned with me as an employee then as a friend. And at that time, in my mind again, maybe another situation where I don't know what would I don't know what you could tell a person who just found that out, who would be like, oh, you know what, you're right, I'll probably come back. I was about to overreact, but yeah, I'll come back. No, I was doing. I was in a bad in a
bad way. And if I would have just listened to you and been like, all right, yeah, I'm not going home. I'll just come to your place and then we'll roll tomorrow and you know, I'm just gonna go out on tour. I'll work this out. But that was not That was not what I did. So then lead me to what happened.
So I'm on the way to somewhere and I pull into Abilene and I remember pulling off the main road and I was on like a feeder road and I'm driving and I get rear ended, which was unfortunate, well a couple of the wasn't the most unfortunate thing that happened that day, but it didn't help. So I get rear ended and stop the car and that guy gets out he's mad at me, and and I was like the wrong guy on the wrong day, you know, not not that I was going to. It was him and
a friend. So it was me against two guys. And I'm not you know, I'm not super I'm not super quick, but I'm not I'm not scared. I could deny both of those things. You just said said, yeah, yes you are, but I was like, uh, you know, it just didn't It didn't matter. I'm not you know, you know, like my goal going into any fights we talked about I have way too much Mexican irish in your button. Yeah, I'm knocking back down and I'm not scared to get hurt.
And that day I would I would have, just like Flagstaff, I would have welcomed it. I don't know what the the I don't know why that welcoming pain into situations like that. I don't know why that that is enticing At that point. I guess you're just so frustrated that you're like, I don't care. I really don't care. I don't care what happens. So I was like, let's fight. Yeah, all right, awesome. Some of these guys wanted to fight you. Yeah, they were mad at me. They rear ended you. Yeah,
and then they wanted to fight you. Yeah, all right, class A citizens. Yeah yeah. It was uh, it was I don't know, it was bad, but they were in me, they want to fight me. The cops get called the sill, they say, both of you pull over, and and the cops are like, well, they're talking to him, and they come over to me and they're like, we smell alcohol. I'm like, yeah, yeah, like what's going on? And I was honest with him. I just told him, Hey, this is going on, this is what's going on. Just found
out this about my marriage. Horrible day. These guys were in me and uh, and they were like, okay, well we're gonna go talk to this guy, but we'll be back. Just hang here. I remember them going to talk to that the other driver, and they were like they were like, well, we're gonna we're gonna stay with him because you know, we believe he's intoxicated. And uh, he's like what about my car? On The cop was like, you rear ended him.
You know, it was your this accident's your fault. But you know, they couldn't leave the scene with me like that, So so they take you to jail. Yes, they do. How did I find out about this? I forgot about jail. Yes, you're going to jail in Ablene, Texas. I don't know. Uh, that's blurry in my memory. There's a couple of things that are blurry, probably more blurry for your Yeah, you remember more than I do. Something like this happened. I
find out you're going to jail in Ablene, Texas. Maybe it was your dad or might have been my dad, maybe your ex wife have been. But you are relaying to me like, hey, you know, I know I'm not going to make tomorrow's show. Yeah, but can you like play acoustic and then I'll just join you guys. I'll just come and meet you on Thursday. Did I even say that? I don't even know that. I was, well, you, I don't remember exactly what you said, but you alluded
to not gonna be there. I'm not gonna be there, but i'll be Just give me a few days and I'll be right back. Yeah, it was my thought, and I was like, dude, you can't come back. Yeah, Like I got to get another drummer and we got to keep going. I can't. And once again to slightly defend myself. This is we talked a lot on your trip to Abling. Yeah, and it wasn't like I wasn't blindsided with this information. I was like, Kala, pull over, pull over, pull or
come back, don't do this, don't do it. And you're like no, no, no, no. And then this happened, and then you're like, hey, I want come back, and I was like, no, dude, that ship has sailed. I don't remember that. I remember having that conversation. I mean, like I said, was there's a lot I don't remember on on the way up to Abilene. Not just getting away from the problem was my main goal, and and that
didn't happen. I made things so significantly worse, not only from like I got arrested, spent the night in Abilene's finest hotel, uh and and then affected my job, you know, all all that stuff negative. And then I was like, yeah, I don't know, it was it was bad. It wasn't. My job wasn't on my mind on the way up there to Abiline. So things are really low for you,
and I find I go into that. We go in the next day, we find a last minute guy to come and kind of sub play drums, not a very good job, but that that's actually the day that dust the Saxton was getting off the road with this rock band, Evans Blue, and was able to come fill in, which he's still to this day. It's been my drummer. I think it's been seven years. And you it's funny because Dusty was the one that recommended you to me. Yeah, because you guys have we've all been in this Texas
music circle. So yeah, so Dusty, there was never any weirdness between Caleb and Dusty. In fact, Dusty had trouble learning a lot of your songs because you're a really good drummer and you you have an interesting open handed style.
But I want to say this, And so you're listening to this podcast, the average listener, and they're thinking, to dud guy, just after you've heard the Flagstaff story, and after you've heard this story, it's like, now, now you've lost your job, and I've already told you, I've already sworn to you this has nothing to do with friendship. We're still going to be friends. And you were like, nah, you leave me like everyone else has. Then I don't
blame you. I would leave me too, But I want to say that I'm not bringing you on here on this podcast to tell the bad story and then end it. I'm bringing you on the podcast just like you told me on text today you said, let's make some more lemonade. And I want I want everyone to hear this story and I want them to be a little shocked and be like too, this guy's that this is this is the end. But then on what unfolded on the next several years for you was very evident. You've had a
lot of blessings in your life since then. Your life is on a completely different path. You have an absolutely incredibly amazing wife now new wife, and amazing little boy, ye who's now three years old. A side note was River's best buddy, Prosper And all the things, all the stories you said, especially that trip to Abiline, everything that happened when your dad told you to pull over and get a hotel and I told you to come back,
and those guys rear ended you. Everything that happened. If it hadn't happen just that way, you might not have found your new life that you have now. It had to play out that bad, or you might have stayed in your miserable existence that you were back then. Yeah, And so I want to I want to tell people as are listening to this that either you could be in this state of being miserable, or you could be you could know somebody that is, or most likely it's
coming and you don't know it's coming. Because life has suffering in it. We all enter suffering and it would come out of it and we go back into it. That's what humans do best. But it's important to hear caleb story. But for some reason, I knew I just knew you, and I knew your heart, I knew your soul. We'd had some deep conversations. I knew you very well, and I knew you you were going to get better and you're going to end up with a new wife and have a new life. And you didn't believe me,
but I told you that. I want to take a break here and then I want to get to that transition period for you. If you're listening to this podcast real time, which is on Monday, then that means tomorrow we're going to launch the brand new shirt of the month. This is our prize package of Yee apparel, you could say, because this is every single month. If you sign up for this subscription. You're gonna get a T shirt delivered in your size. It's exclusive that's not sold anywhere else.
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You can get that discount if you go with the discount code Shirt of the month. That's the promo code shirt of the month type that in. You get your first one for ten bucks. You're really going to be happy. I love this club. So we fast forward a few months. You pick up a job working for an electrician and then you luck out and he actually has a shop. Yeah, you could live in. It's almost like sling Blade, the movie where you live in the garudge repair. My life
was a lot like sling Blade. I mean, uh so, yeah, it was. He had a detached shop, which was actually probably very close to this the size of this office. It had upstairs, but that was used for storage. Downstairs there was his desk, some storage, and then a couch, and so I lived on the couch, So like one half half what this office was was what I lived in with a dog named Hank and my guitar. So you that was your reset place. You got a new job,
you were absolutely miserable. Understandably. I would go and visit you there. Which is an other ironic thing, is that then I we ended up when we had River, ended up moving just down the road from Matt House. Yeah, like maybe two miles. Interesting, and you slowly began putting your life back together. And it probably seemed when you were in the middle of that rebuild that nothing was happening, nothing was improving. You were destined to fail in the world.
You were cursed in some way, you had bad luck, as I've heard you say back then, and you were almost just accepting that that's just Caleb Kelly was a mess up. Yeah, And I remember one day telling you, I think I said, you are the biggest underachiever I've ever met. Yeah, something like that, Because here's this guy, that's smart, witty, funny, very handy, very talented musically, and you just kept underachieving on every level in all of those categories. What can I say? And at some point
I just couldn't. I couldn't listen to you feel sorry for yourself anymore, and I had to start taking a different approach of bro the is this going to get better? Ten years? I think I even said, ten years from now, you're going to have a new girl, You're going to be in a new life. And tell me about how what happened with with Heidi? Where did she come from? So well, she came from heaven. Seriously, she's an angel.
And so what happened was I was on Instagram and saw her and she was posting for a benefit for her sister that she lost to cancer. And I lost Levi to cancer, she lost her amber to cancer. So I just messaged her and said, is there anything I can do? Even at this she didn't know at this time in my life. It was this crazy dude living in a office. But I was just like, is there anything I can do? She was like, yeah, you can, you know, repost this flyer for the benefit. And that's
what it did. And we started talking. We had a lot in common, and we started talking on the phone, and then and then went and got her from Kansas and brought her back, and she has been Ah, it's it's hard to describe the total opposite of what I am. She is the calm, cool, collected, compassionate, you know. She she's she has everything prepared for everybody and always has like a little gift for everybody, And I am not that.
So yeah, I don't I don't know how that really happened, because, like I said, I was just like a you know, living there on that what I called my island, and then moved into I did move into a house when I brought her back from Kansas. But yeah, that was that was a win that I did not see coming. I didn't. I didn't believe you. I thought it was
just gonna be just gonna be kind of crazy. If looking back on it, if I would have told myself, if if the me now could walk up to the me then and be like, you're gonna be okay, You're gonna be okay, You're gonna make it through this. You
don't have an option but to overcome. I want to get to that what you're saying, and I want to go into detail about that, but because of your legal restrictions, you couldn't leave town pretty much, so traveling on the road as a drummer, even though everything's pretty good in your life, traveling on the road still ain't gonna happen. Then what what what ends up happening is my Amber ends up becoming really close with your Heidi. And Heidi
is a really good nanny slash babysitter. So we have crazy little River at home and young Lincoln young London, and if Amber needs to do anything, Heidi comes over and starts babysitting. She's perfect babysitter. And then you guys have prosper little boys the same age as River, So like worked out great because then Heidi could watch the two young ones and then Lincoln in London, and then if your two older ones came, it's like just a big farm of kids. And you would usually come with
her when that happened. Yeah, so they're during this time, I'm touring like crazy. So at some point I was like, Hey, Caleb, I'm torn like crazy. Could you take care of a couple of things around the house when I'm gone, because I would come home and then I would have a turn and burn, like a twenty four hour turn and burn, and be out doing something else. And I like, things were starting to break in the house, and you're really handy, so you could fix this faucet and then you could
move this electrical outlet. And then I was like, hey, do you mind mowing the grass? And then you would do that. And then I was like, you do you mind that dead tree out there needs cut down? And you'd cut that, and so then I turned into like a full time job. How do you would come babysit when Amber needed help. You would help me with yard and housework when I'm on tour. And then we had this list system going. You would just check off things on the list, and before we know it, you're working
for me Like that can just like sneakily happened. You're just all of a sudden, you're back and and it didn't We didn't even take that much time off. But it's it's crazy that, you know, and I said this on the last podcast, You know, I trust you and Heidi more than most everyone else in my life. With my most valuable possessions, my wife and my kids and and I think part of that trust that I had not because we're just close friends, but because we'd had
the diversity in our lives that we had. We had some problems that we had to read we were forced to resolve, like we had to stare it in the face and fix it. We couldn't just leave and go somewhere else. We had to deal with it, and that humans are. You gain so much trust with each other when you make it through the fire and then come back out the other side. That ended up leading to you working from there to here at EE Apparel managing the warehouse, and I wanted to take time to go
to dive into what you're saying. If someone's listening, and this is where you get to make lemonade. If someone's listening going through this, or their brothers going through their sister, or their dad or or their son, or their daughter, or their friend, or it's them and they're in that dark moment like you'd say, they're in that the Electricians shop, sleeping on a couch with a dog with no hope. You were there and you remember it, and you did not think you're going to be here today. So what
could you say? What could you possibly say to that person, Let's say, well, first off, don't give up. You know, there's there's nothing there's nothing you can't get through or you can't fix is kind of a weird word. I don't know about fix. But there's nothing you can't get through. Sometimes you can get through stuff. You don't exactly fix it, you get through it, you know what I mean. And but don't give up. I couldn't have told you that back then. That wouldn't have worked. No, So what do
you say to that person? Because if I, if I came over to a kale, remember, don't give up. You probably punched me in the mouth. Well, and we've talked about this. I think whether it be adversity or grief, maybe like I would have understood it maybe a little more if at that time you you had had something similar happened, you know what I mean, Like who has
something similar like to that? But like we always we always say, uh, you know, I always tell you one drop of empathy is equal to five gallon buck a five gallon bucket of sympathy, So you've got the one drop equal to five gallon bucket. So I would have listened more, you know. So I'm hoping that, hoping someone out there who is going through something has watched these two episodes and been like, he has gone through some stuff, and maybe it'll maybe it'll hit home a little harder.
It's it's not that what it's not that what you said wasn't one hundred percent right and I probably should have just listened to you. It was that it was that I wasn't listening to you as much as I should have. If someone who went through a whole bunch of other stuff would have said the same exact thing, I probably would have listened more. And that's a funny thing about empathy, is that it it hits more. Now we share a lot of the same air when it
comes to grief and hardship. Now I think, I mean, it feels not the same exact air, but you know it, it's just different. So I'm hoping that when I say don't give up, maybe maybe they believe it because you know, because of that stuff that have gone through And I'm I'm thankful for the stuff that I went through because it today right here today, I'm in a position where I can tell people we don't give up. Yeah, And
maybe that's maybe they don't give up. If that sounds too big of a task for you, maybe it's don't give up on today. Yeah, don't give up on what. Don't give up on today? What does that mean? Just make it through the day. That's all you got to do. Don't give up on today. And when things were tough for me, sometimes I would have to tell myself, just don't give up on this minute, don't give up on this hour. Like I don't know what did, I don't know where this next breath is going to come from,
but just don't give up on the current one. Yeah. And then somehow, some way, the sun goes down and then comes up again the next morning, and then goes down again tomorrow, it comes up the day after tomorrow, and it just keeps. The rhythm of the earth keeps happening. And by don't give up, you're not talking about you're on a twenty mile run and you're really tired, you want to fall out of the race, And it's not that. Just stay here, yeah, just stay just breathe. Yeah, that's
all it is. You know. I remember reading one time the on the the Alcoholic Steps, what's the saying when it comes to alcoholics? Anonymous that's like, don't strive for perfection. What's that saying, Uh, just strive. I'm gonna get it wrong. I don't remember paraphrase. It's like, don't strive for don't strive for perfection, just strive for something. And before I really knew what that meant, I was like, that sounds
like a cop out. You should always try to be great, always strive for greatness, try to be the best, try to strive for greatness. That's that's what every Self Helped book says on the cover, and Barnes and Noble, being your best, try for great But the reality is sometimes you just need to strive to just get the day done. Yeah, and that that was the victory was making it to the next day. So sometimes that can be hard. So that don't give up is don't give up. You know
you it will get better. Do not or try not to make things worse. I made my life at that point would have been it would have been bad. Losing the boys and then finding out about that would have been bad. That would have been bad for I think I think anybody can agree that would have been pretty pretty crappy year. But I made it worse. And you know, you may think life couldn't possibly get worse. It could all get worse. No matter how low you've dug yourself,
you could go lower. You know, the every minute to minute that my life was then thinking about my brothers and then thinking about the betrayal would have been enough, but then it was losing brothers, then the betrayal. Okay, I gotta go pay this court costs. I gotta go do this class. I've got to, you know, ignition, interlock,
all these different things on top of what happened. So if I can tell you one thing, and it is my new mantra when it comes to talking to people, it is that it's like, don't make it worse because you want to get better and you want your life to get better, and trust me, it doesn't get better if you make it worse with those incredibly stupid decisions. Do you love your current wife and your current little boy? Oh my gosh, I I couldn't. I did not let
me rephrase that current wife. Do you love your wife? Yes? Yes, I could not imagine my life without her, As weird as it sounds. Sometimes I have to remind myself that's a different individual, not like half of me feels like that, but I have to go. She's she's her own personally, you know, we are not. And because that's what it feels like. And then and you and you and anyone listening that that has something like what you have now.
You don't have your wife and your little boy without the series of events that were so terrible that led you to them. Yeah, that goes away. That that joy goes away if you lose the suffering. Yeah, the butterfly effect. And that is mind blowing and it's very biblical. Also, yeah, you it's really hard to I couldn't tell myself back
then that, Hey, your your life. Okay, Yeah, I know you're having a really hard time right now with the boys, and then with this happened, But you are going to have this knockout of a dame and you're gonna have this little kid who looks just like Jack Jack from the Incredibles and is twice as crazy. I would have been like, what are you even talking about? No, that's not gonna happen. That's not gonna happen. My life, my life is paying, my life is suffering. This keeps happening. Yeah,
I wouldn't believed you. I love that Apostle Paul says that suffering creates perseverance. Perseverance creates character, Character creates hope, and so basically what he's saying Post Inspired by God says that you don't you do not have hope without suffering doesn't exist. Hope doesn't exist without first suffering. We don't want to suffer as humans, we don't want to, but we are required to to have true hope. And that is as deep as this podcast you can get.
But you are the You're the living proof of that that through a series of unimaginable suffering, it led you to unimaginable hope that you have now in your future and your life and your and who you are and your purpose. Ultimately Caleb Kelly's purpose on this earth, it all came from suffering. Yeah, Yeah, it was just some things have to, Like you're saying, some things have to.
There's one of the rare pigments in paint is this bluestone they find in the mountains of Afghanistan, and the rarest pigment on Earth is made from this bluestone that they have to crush into a fine enough powder to turn into paint. So you have to take this bluestone. It's absolutely beautiful on its own, but in order you can't paint with rock. You can paint rocks, but you can't paint with this rock. But they have to crush it to this fine powder and then it is one
of the rarest pigments in paint in the world. But it had to be crushed all the way down to the finest to lose us to gain that. You hear that story repeated so many times. So if you're listening to this podcast, if you if you're suffering, and you probably are because you're human, hang on, make it through this minute, this hour, this week. Just hang on. You don't have to set records on the race. You just have to finish. That's it, dude, Thanks for being on again.
Maybe we'll do more. There's so many more road stories. We don't have to get that deep. There's just like one ear Doug stories galore that would be fun to tell. But I think we got to get back to work. We got a a fall launch coming up here, just a couple of weeks. I'm working again. You gotta go work. See you guys,