Will I cancel the tour because of the Coronavirus?

bit different because of the new crazy news. And so I'm partly recording this for you guys so that you don't hear this podcast and think, oh my gosh, he's not talking about the crazy, you know, new turn of events that we've had in these last few days. That being said, some of you watching this might not be affected that much by the coronavirus. Me personally, my world has been turned upside down touring. The entire touring industry has completely collapsed, and that is where artists like me

and so many others make all of their money. So essentially, I've lost my job and I'm okay. I have YouTube and other things, but the you know, I have a lot of band members and crew guys on salaries, so that is the concern, is trying to get them paid through when we start touring again. The latest I've heard is May. Somewhere around May, we're gonna start touring again once again. This has nothing to do with our decision or promoters or venues, are booking agents or everybody wants

to tour. This is the This is happening at the federal level that all these gatherings are being canceled. So the next podcast you hear will probably be a lot about this. But I wanted to just give you a quick intro so that you know, as this podcast comes on it was pre coronavirus. Enjoy yourselves, you'll be safe. Welcome to the Granger Smith Podcast. Hey guys, what's up. It's Granger Smith. Welcome to the Granger Smith Podcast, Episode twenty three. Thank you guys for listening or watching if

you're watching on YouTube. If you're watching on YouTube, go ahead and do me a favor and subscribe to the Granger Smith channel so you don't miss any of these videos coming up. And then while you're at it, go over there and subscribe to the Smith channel so you don't miss any of our family vlogs that we just love putting out. It's a huge passion of mine to put out two videos a week on the Smiths and then one video a week on the podcast. And we

are releasing these podcasts every single Monday, really early. I believe they're set for about five am, so that it catches everyone on their way to work, a way to school, whatever that might be. I am sitting here in the back of my bus in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. What a crazy year this has been so far, and what a crazy tour this has been. I'm sitting here looking at this and I'm like, I got to do a podcast and take these headphones off, and dinner is coming up.

So I have about thirty minutes to do this podcast, and that's plenty of time. There's plenty of time to talk to you guys to answer some of these questions. I got these questions today from Instagram. So I'll go and I'll check Instagram hashtag Granger Smith Podcast. I'll check Twitter, Facebook, and I'm also checking the comments on the YouTube page too.

It so I'm finding these questions that you guys are asking and I'm gonna dive into them first question I have here is what is the most memorable thing that has ever happened at one of your concerts? And I

like that question. I like it when people ask me that because it has to be well, Okay, one instance in Iraq, We're playing a tour in Iraq and literally a bomb went off close to where we were having a concert, and the immediate response team jumped up leaves and half the room left and they made us go into a bunker. Halfway through the concert. So we were in a gymnasium, So we're literally crawling on the ground in the gymnasium and we had to go to a

concrete bunker. And I am kind of an adrenaline junkie, so I was loving it. Some of the other guys in the band were absolutely terrified. You know, I understand why, But that's number one that tops tops the question for sure, what is the most memorable thing that's ever happened at one of my concerts? But then after that, I would have to say it would have to be some of my injuries, which I've been injured several times as Earl

Diuvile Junior. I have completely separated a shoulder, I have split my forehead open right in the middle, which cost seven stitches. That was in College Station, Texas, and I was running up the stage as Earl ran right into the speaker. Blood went everywhere. You know, your forehead bleeds really bad. So I turned and looked at the crowd, and I just saw horrified faces looking back at me, and I didn't realize what was happening until I saw their face and then saw the drips coming off of

my nose and knew it was really bad. Finished that concert and then went to the well. I say finished. I got a towel and wiped off a little bit, and then off the emergency room. And then another time I fell off the stage in New Jersey. A lot of you guys have heard this story. I've told this on a previous podcast and fell off the stage, broke two ribs, one of the ribs punctured along, got back on that stage, finished that show, and then went to

the emergency room again. So I have a lot of these little injury memories as Earl, and it's it's never fun, but it always makes really good stories. And it's always Earl for some reason. All right, let me look at let me look what other things I have has has take us through the process of coming up with a song. How does it happen? And that's a that's a good question, and I have several processes. I I think in terms

of either melodies or lyrics, and they're pretty separate. There's not a lot of times that they come in together in my mind, so they usually come in separately. Some melody and I'm just humming and or some lyric I think that's a really cool line and this is what rhymes with it. So it's not too often that I get them together. But what I do is I'll go in and have a list of notes on my phone.

I'll write all the lyrics down or the titles down, and then I have my voice memos and I'll kind of hum melodies and then I just try to merge them together. And that's typically when I get up early. That's when I like to write. Make a cup of coffee, pull out the old phone, pull out a pen and paper, and see which ideas merge together that hopefully makes a song. And you know what, most of the time, it doesn't. Most of the time I sit down and write a song,

nothing happens, and it sucks. It's called writer's block, and it's a real thing. But then when it does start flowing and it feels good and the songs come out, it's great. Another a way to battle writer's block. The number one way to battle writer's block is to get some of my buddies out to write with me, which is going to happen next weekend. And so I get some of my good friends out and then we all come in and then we all kind of make up

for each other. If one of us is kind of lacking with a writer's block situation, the other one could knock us out of it, and vice versa, and we quickly can get through some pretty good songs that way. Here's a good question, the question everybody's thinking about right now. Are you going to cancel any of your tour dates with all the coronavirus things going on? Oh gosh, no,

I'm not. I'm not going to cancel it. But you know, I just heard we're from Austin, Texas, and I just heard south By Southwest, a huge music festival, canceled, canceled, completely canceled. I can't imagine all the businesses that are gonna hurt from that decision. Guys, I don't see I don't see the hype from this. I know that it's going to affect me negative at some point with ticket sales. If it keeps on ramping up and then the news keeps making it headlines and clickbait, then it's going to

affect musicians or anybody else in the public business. It's going to affect us. So that sucks. And I don't see the hype. I don't, I don't, I don't. I don't understand it. Besides the fact that guys, you know this, we live in a clickbait world. We live in a world where everyone, all these major news stations, they want you to click on their station, they want you to click on their posts, they want you to watch what they're saying because those views and those streams make them

more money. So, for instance, if if I was a director of a news company, I would say, let's say, hey, somebody figure out a way that we could post coronavirus has mutated. And so then you know, you get these little people in the background and they're like figuring out and they technically I figured out a way we could say that, and it's technically true, even though it's a far stretch, and so then they go, great, make up something, find a picture, and we'll call it coronavirus mutation faster

than normal. And that's a pretty good click. And you and me and everyone else that sees that it's probably going to click on that. That's the world we live in. I don't trust it, and so it makes it tough to answer your question. I'm not going to cancel any tourt eights, at least I don't think so, unless it turns into some kind of Walking Dead zombie apocalypse, which I don't think this is going to happen. Guys, don't buy into the hype. Don't buy into the hype. Next question,

the earpieces you use for your shows? What are they for? And does it play the music? That's a good question. Look, I got it right here, just got out of sound check here in Baton Rouge, and these are called an ear monitors, and they come in many sizes, many colors. Mine are kind of a one of them is kind of a clear blue, and one of them is kind of a solid red. I'm smiling because you know why, you know why one is blue and one is red. And you could make these any color you want. You

could design them any way you want. I used to have camouflage my old ones, my backups are camouflage. You could do anything you want. I made mind blue and red because red means right, ear red for right, so I can just quickly see them and throw it in. So what it means is and if you're a musician and you know this, don't worry about it. If you don't know it. Musicians, most of us now, we wear these as opposed to floor monitors or wedges as they're

sometimes called, that play the music back to us. And that's what these do. It's basically the music you're hearing playing back to us. Why do we need that, Well, the reason is if we're behind the speakers, which we typically are, the speakers are throwing out the sound forward so that the crowd could hear it, and us the band, the people behind the speakers are getting a delayed version of that, or an echoed version of that, or some kind of distorted version of that. So it's really difficult

for us to play together with each other. The bass player playing with the drummer, the guitar players playing together, me singing to the drummers beat. All those things need to be very in syne and they need to be perfectly in time. So we all wear these anier monitors that's run by a monitor board on the side of

the stage. So if you see one of our sound guys on the side of the stage or at any concert, that sound guy with his board, with his mixing board, he is mixing the sound that the musicians on stage are hearing. Only if you see the audio guy out front, we call it front of house. He's out in the back of the concert with a big soundboard inside the play where all the fans are. He is mixing what you hear from the audience perspective. He's mixing the big speakers.

So that's it. You gotta have both. You gotta have a monitor engineer and a front of house engineer, both of them. You gotta have it. It's a good question. Here's one that says, what is your favorite thing to do after a show? And you know, I could I can kind of connect that with another question on saw on here that said how do you unwind after a show? And guys, when it comes to that stuff, I'm super boring and like a part of me wants to be able to say, oh man, after the show. That's when

it parts. That's when the party happens. We do all that, you know. We go out and we go find the best burger joint in town and it's closed, and we get the owner to open it back up, and he opens it up and they all get in there and they fry up the best burgers. I think that's what

Elvis used to do. Elvis used to get on his plane in the middle of the night and fly across the country just to have a burger in the middle of the night, and they would open it up for the guy lived at night only because he couldn't walk around the day. My life very very different than Elvis, very boring. First of all, I get up pretty early.

When I'm at home. I get up around six Amberg usually gets up a little before me, and I used to get up at like five, but it started affecting me too much at night because I need to get seven hours. That's like my thing. I got to get seven hours. So when I'm on the road it changes a little bit. I'd usually get up around seven on the road because if I need seven hours, I always add an hour on the bus because it just sleeping

on a bus is rough, it rattles, it bumps. I'm right here in this room where we are, where this camera sitting is. The engine is right under where this camera is sitting, so the motor is super loud. Two nights ago, we were driving to Alabama and I heard us pull over very abru and you hear the rumble strips in the middle of the night. You know that's that'll wake up quick. So we wake up to the rumble strips, and then I hear all these emergency vehicles

fine by, you know, sirens. Like, guys, you don't want to wake up in the middle of the night to sirens. You just don't. That's like not something that's pleasant to wake up to in the middle of the night. But that's bus life. Long story short, there was a wreck and when we had to wait. But needless to say, I have to add about an hour to my sleep at night. So I get up at seven And partly

what that does is the bus is quiet. I can get some reading in, I can get some songwriting in and get some podcasting in even on It's five point forty five pm right now, and that kind of allows me to get some stuff done. And then about eight o'clock or nine o'clock between eight and nine sometime we

go to the gym. Every single day we go to the gym, and that gets my day going to come back and make it shake here we usually have lunch provided then I kind of start the routine of my day, which might be something involving country radio, and then sound checks. All that to say, by the end of the show. As soon as I get off the stage, I jump right in here and I take a shower. There's a shower right behind this wall. And I'm tired. I'm really tired.

So especially if the show's late tonight is a ten to fifteen PM start time, and I'm gonna play ninety minutes and that's gonna make me come back to the bus around midnight. I'm gonna take a shower and I'm going to crash hard. So that is my after show routine, crashing hard, and then I will sleep till about seven, So there's my seven hours. We'll see what else I got here? What are the questions? I just basically screenshot a bunch of social media questions and then I flip through.

If I wanted to get into the country music industry, where would I start. This is from Lindsay on Instagram. Actually I think it might be Liam Lindsay, which is a guy. Sorry Liam, Okay, So there's two parts. I

guess there's kind of two parts of this. If you want to get into the country music industry as an artist or a musician, or if you want to get into the country music industry as a uh, someone behind the scenes in the business, And I actually could probably say that's probably three different things because artists and musician aren't exactly the same musicians. If you want to be a musician in country music and you feel like you're good enough to take it to a bigger level, you

got a network. You gotta you gotta know the right people that know when the auditions are so and for the most part, those are in Nashville. The big country music tours, most of them are in Nashville. Mine is out of Austin. Most are in Nashville. And so if you want to be a guitar player or drummer or a player or something like that, you probably need to make a bunch of friends that are in other bands so that when somebody's auditioning for a new player, you're there.

If you want to be a singer. I could do a whole podcast on this, Liam. I don't think that's what you're talking about, but you might be. And I could do an entire podcast on this question alone. And in fact, I might start doing a series on how to be a country singer. I might. I'm thinking about it. You guys comment below if you think I should do a series on how to be a country singer, if there are enough people that would like to listen, because I can go in great links about that, but I'll

just start with the beginning of that one. If you want to be a singer, then start with an instrument. Start playing an instrument, whether that's guitar or keyboard, and start singing along with that instrument. Start writing songs while you're singing along to that instrument. This is going in order, by the way. And then lastly, start recording the songs that you wrote and saying while you're playing an instrument, drive around and listen or watch that recording. That's step one.

Do that and do that for a few years, and take good note on what you like that you hear and what you don't like. Do more what you like, less of what you don't and you will evolve quickly that way. It's very important. I'm using pro Tools right now as I'm recording this podcast, and this is the same program and the same microphone I do work tapes or the way I write songs. So I think it's very important for musicians to learn some kind of recording software.

Pro Tools is the most popular if you want to get into the music industry. If maybe that's what your question is too. As a business person, so you may maybe management or record label, or booking agency or publicity. Those unfortunately are very networking type positions too. That requires internships, once again, mostly in Nashville, sometimes New York, sometimes La sometimes Austin, sometimes Atlanta. That requires a lot of knowing the right people, going to the right interviews, doing a

lot of internships. And it doesn't always require an education. And a lot of people will go to a music school like Belmont and get a music business degree. And what's more important than that degree is the people you meet in that school, the professors, the other students, and the internship possibilities that that school brings. There's so much more to that question, but I will look at the comments on this and kind of base base it if I need to keep talking about that on another Monday podcast.

I get this a lot. Where's your favorite place to put on a concert? And I'm gonna be honest that the true answer is is it's it's the people. It's based on the people. It's not the place. We have played in very beautiful places. We've played in beautiful beach towns or beautiful snow Vista resorts, but those aren't the best concerts unless it has the best people and the

people that are most engaged. So give me one hundred people that are super engaged, that are just die hard fans that know every word and they're they're just they're watching me and I could I could do any hand motion and they follow me with it. I could walk on the stage and they follow me with their eyes and I could. That's I don't even have to sing. Then they could sing for me. That's the best concert.

So it's it's not always the coolest stage or the prettiest city, or it's not that it helps if it's a great crowd. It helps to be with a beautiful mountain or sunset behind you, But it's not everything. Let me look at another question here. There's the one I was looking for how do you unwind after a high energy show? Now you know, I take a shower, I turn the lights down. Got to turn the lights down. If you want to rewind, you got to get away from your screens. I stop the screens have like a

million lights on me right now as I speak. As I say that, because I need to stay awake. All right, here we go. How should I propose to my girlfriend? Bro? You need to email Chris C. Chris at Grangersmith dot com. That's my tour manager, and you need to say, hey, man, Granger Smith told me on his podcast to email you so that I could come on the stage during happens like that at your concert and you'll Granger will get

me up and I can propose to my girlfriend. That's how you do it, my man, That's how you do it. Email christ granger Smith dot com and I want you on the stage to do this. I'm assuming since you messaged me with that question that this is a great possibility. Let me let me, let me change change gears here and then I'm gonna I'm gonna go and get me a dinner at Baton Rouge. I'm gonna do a little

I'm gonna do a little eat and greet. That's what we're doing today with the radio stations called Eating greet. So I'm gonna eat and then people are gonna come in and eat, and I'm gonna do a question and answer. I'm gonna answer more questions with the radio station on the stage to some radio winners, and then after that it's meeting great time, and then it's showtime, and I want you guys. I want you guys to know that a lot of these questions were when do you come

in to my town? You know, when you come in Australia, when you come in to Germany, when you come in to my Hey, we're doing our best. I promise, we are doing our best. We're gonna we are going to be close to you this year, I promise, including Europe hopefully Australia. So trust me, we're gonna try to make it. Go to Grangersmith dot com forward slash Tour and you could also get tickets and meet and greets on that

same link, so we sell both. You could always meet me and uh, which is exactly what I'm gonna do after this question. So I gotta I get a lot of these and I need. I need to tackle at least one of them. And I want you guys to know that it's okay to ask me anything, and I'm cool with that. But here, but here's the question. How have you and Amber found purpose slash joy and Riv's death? What is it? And that is yes, that is the question, isn't it? That is the question? And that's from Rachel

on Instagram. And not only is it a great question, but it's kind of it's kind of the question in this kind of this kind of lost, this kind of you know, parents, parents losing a child or the first thing, first thing I wanted to know when this happened was, you know, my human brain said, what's the reason? What's the reasons? You know, like, what are the technical reasons? And it didn't take me long to stop that wrongful thinking,

because what happened happened. And I've said before on the Smiths that we've had to learn it happened, but it's not happening. Right, there's a big difference. It happened, but it's not happening. We had to learn that, and so I also had to learn stop looking for the reasons and start looking for the meaning. And that's been my biggest thing, and so I could I could trade your word purpose for meaning. There kind of go hand in hand,

and finding meaning comes from responsibility. Responsibility starts with you, starts with yourself. And so that's what I did, is the first thing I wanted to do was help others. And so as soon as I felt like I was in a place where I could function, I could brush my teeth, I can comb my hair, then I wanted to immediately help Amber. And once I could help Amber, we wanted to help the kids. Once we helped the kids,

then we wanted to reach out to extended family. And once we helped extended family, we wanted to help other

families that were in need. And so that's what we did, and that's how we found meaning, was we continue to grow that ring of responsibility outward with a lending hand, with a word of encouragement, with helping, with putting a question like this on the podcast that maybe someone is listening to, maybe someone that needs to hear this can find meaning in these words, and then in turn, that's a meaning for me. And that's how you offset suffering

is through meaning. That's the only way to offset suffering in this life. Because this life is going to have suffering. It's inevitable. It is so much about suffering, and the only way to fight it, to battle it, to offset it is through meaning. So you find meaning through people, through relationships, but you need to start with yourself. It has to start with yourself. I'm talking about making your bed, I'm talking about cleaning your room. I'm talking about being

a functional human. It has to start with that. And as that ring grew out, and as Amber and I got stronger, we started to find meaning and helping others. And you guys have noticed a shift on my Instagram, You've noticed a shift on the Smiths, and you've noticed what we're doing on this podcast. I'm trying to find meaning and it's a never ending search because we'll always build on that, we'll always continue to season that as much as we can. And that's what this is all about.

To me. It's about finding that meaning. And so yes, Rachel, we have found it. And it's the responsibility and it goes all the way out to the community and it goes to people just like you. Thank you, guys, thank you for listening, thank you for watching, Thank you for supporting The Grangersmith Podcast. And everything that we do. Ye Ye, thank you so much for supporting Ye Apparel. I mean, that's that's I don't get to talk about it a lot,

but that is my baby. Yee Apparel is my baby that me and my brother started in and that doesn't exist without the support of people like y'all. So check outye apparel dot com, check out grangersmith dot com. Forward slash tour so I could see you out there and ask me a question. Hashtag granger Smith on your favorite social media channel. Love you guys, See you down the road. Eye