Speaker 1: What's up. It's Granger Smith. This is the Granger Smith Podcast,
Speaker 1: Episode one, five fifteen. Thank y'all for caring enough to
Speaker 1: listen to me on a podcast. I put out episode
Speaker 1: fourteen in October, and for those of you keeping score,
Speaker 1: it is January nineteenth, and that's been a long time,
Speaker 1: so I'm sorry. I've had a lot of people telling
Speaker 1: me and meeting greets when I talked to him saying
Speaker 1: when your next podcast, And in my defense, a lot
Speaker 1: has gone on since the last podcast I have. Of course,
Speaker 1: the holiday season, I had hey documentary that came out
Speaker 1: called They Were There, which I'm very proud of. And
Speaker 1: we've been making some new music which I'm so excited
Speaker 1: to play you guys very soon. Can't do it today,
Speaker 1: but very soon. But I do have some loose ends
Speaker 1: to tie up on that last episode fourteen. I have
Speaker 1: to finish that story. I have to talk about the
Speaker 1: current tour that I'm on. I have to talk about
Speaker 1: what I think twenty nineteen is going to bring to
Speaker 1: you from me. Here we go. I'm in Norman, Oklahoma today.
Speaker 1: It is a Saturday in the parking lot. I'm in
Speaker 1: the back of my bus wild Flower, and it is
Speaker 1: really cold. It's like nineteen degrees outside, which is cold
Speaker 1: for a Central Texas boy. We are at the University
Speaker 1: of Oklahoma and we're playing in the basketball arena on
Speaker 1: the Cane Brown Lift Forever Tour. And this is for
Speaker 1: me right now, the end of the second week of
Speaker 1: this tour. And I'll tell you what. This has been
Speaker 1: a really really good tour for me. I have theories
Speaker 1: on why it's so good. And fan wise, this has
Speaker 1: been the loudest compared to Florida Georgia Line Tour that
Speaker 1: I was on two years ago and then last year
Speaker 1: the Luke Bryan Tour, this has been the loudest, fans,
Speaker 1: the most accepting, the most people in their seats when
Speaker 1: I start, I'm talking sold out everyone in their seat.
Speaker 1: That's the testament to EE nation. That's also a testament
Speaker 1: to Cane Round fans that don't know me, that hopefully
Speaker 1: do now what a blast this has been. Let me
Speaker 1: talk about this documentary. It's called they Were There, a
Speaker 1: Heroes documentary, and I've taken a lot of time to
Speaker 1: make this documentary. It took about three years and the
Speaker 1: concept of it goes way beyond that. It goes back
Speaker 1: all the way to two thousand and seven when I
Speaker 1: took my first entertainment tour in Iraq. After coming back
Speaker 1: from that tour, I was so motivated. I wanted to
Speaker 1: go to Iraq and play music. And I think I've
Speaker 1: talked about this in a previous podcast, but I wanted
Speaker 1: to bring a little piece of home to the soldiers
Speaker 1: to tell them thank you for allowing me to play music.
Speaker 1: But what I got out of it was so much more.
Speaker 1: What I got was this vision of who these men
Speaker 1: and women are, what they're doing twenty four to seven,
Speaker 1: no breaks, no holidays. The sacrifice became real to me
Speaker 1: when I saw it over there in the desert. So
Speaker 1: I came back and immediately wanted to go and go
Speaker 1: back to Iraq again. So I went back two more times.
Speaker 1: I went back twice in two thousand and eight. One
Speaker 1: of those was a Christmas in New Year's When I
Speaker 1: got home to Texas after that third trip to Iraq,
Speaker 1: I was motivated to bring that feeling that I had
Speaker 1: that was an addicting feeling, to help out the cause,
Speaker 1: to say thank you to these men and women. And
Speaker 1: I wanted other civilians to feel that same thing that
Speaker 1: I had, So I decided on a whim, you know,
Speaker 1: one crazy day, that I was going to walk one
Speaker 1: hundred miles in combat boots over the course of five
Speaker 1: days from South Austin up to Fort Hood, Texas. I
Speaker 1: had never done anything like this. It just, you know,
Speaker 1: I just thought, you know, we'll walk one hundred miles
Speaker 1: and I'll create awareness and morale and patriotism and say
Speaker 1: thank you and raise some money for a charity called
Speaker 1: Boot Campaign for returning Soldiers re entering civilian life. That
Speaker 1: was so fun that first Boot walk. We had so
Speaker 1: many volunteers that came out and walked with me. I
Speaker 1: camped on the side of the road. It went along
Speaker 1: along with a song that I had called Sleeping on
Speaker 1: the Intercede at the time, and that led the year two.
Speaker 1: That year led the year three, and year four. I
Speaker 1: did that four years in a row where I walked
Speaker 1: one hundred miles from South Austin up to Fort Hood.
Speaker 1: But after the fourth time, I lost my dad. He
Speaker 1: died of a heart attack in March twenty fourteen, and
Speaker 1: it changed my perspective on a lot of things. It
Speaker 1: changed the way I looked at heroes because my dad
Speaker 1: was my hero. And when he died, I felt like
Speaker 1: that would die along with him, that what made him
Speaker 1: a hero would be lost, and I wanted to retell
Speaker 1: that story, and I realized that I really couldn't, and
Speaker 1: I wanted to tell everybody, the whole world, what he
Speaker 1: meant to me. It was through that grieving process that
Speaker 1: really opened my eyes to fallen soldiers, the heroes that
Speaker 1: they were, and that if I felt like that about
Speaker 1: my dad, who was my hero, how should we feel
Speaker 1: as Americans about soldiers, fallen soldiers that died volunteering to
Speaker 1: protect our freedom, to allow us to live the American dream?
Speaker 1: How did those families feel that have lost that soldier, forgotten, lost,
Speaker 1: unable to tell the world who this man or woman was. Probably, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that was the perspective I had, And so I thought,
Speaker 1: you know what, this one hundred mile walk that I've
Speaker 1: done for four years needs to change a little bit.
Speaker 1: I want to I want to honor soldiers. You know.
Speaker 1: My first thought was to honor one hundred fallen soldiers
Speaker 1: one per mile. And I was talking to one of
Speaker 1: my friends, a wounded warrior himself named Joey Jones, and
Speaker 1: I was excited. I said, I want to honor a
Speaker 1: hundred soldiers and walk one hundred miles and each mile
Speaker 1: marker will represent one soldier. And he said, man, I
Speaker 1: appreciate your inspiration, but let me be honest with you.
Speaker 1: I think you would be better suited to represent five
Speaker 1: soldiers one each day. That way you could you could
Speaker 1: really concentrate on who they were, the lives that they lived,
Speaker 1: and spend an entire day talking about the soldier that
Speaker 1: he was right. It was a great idea. And so
Speaker 1: what I wanted to do was not know anything about
Speaker 1: a soldier and learn about them during the course of
Speaker 1: the day. So the families would send me a care package, letters,
Speaker 1: anything that I needed to know about this soldier that
Speaker 1: would would let me understand more about the hero that
Speaker 1: they were, the lives that they lived, the hometowns, the mothers,
Speaker 1: the wives, the families, the brothers, the friends. And that's
Speaker 1: what we did. I decided to go to West Texas
Speaker 1: Big Ben National Park, a place I had never been
Speaker 1: as a Texan, went out there and picked five days
Speaker 1: and walked about the still the equivalent of one hundred miles.
Speaker 1: Even though it was more of a hike and it
Speaker 1: was a religious experience for me, it was unbelievable, and
Speaker 1: we filmed a documentary. This all started when I went
Speaker 1: to social media and asked for gold Star families to
Speaker 1: submit their stories, and we got over three hundred submissions
Speaker 1: of fallen soldiers and we had to go through and
Speaker 1: pick five, which was difficult. And it wasn't like we
Speaker 1: went and picked the most dramatic, craziest stories. We decided
Speaker 1: to pick five stories that represented the whole, that represented
Speaker 1: the greater group, which was very difficult. It was including
Speaker 1: one suicide. It was very appropriate to add a suicide
Speaker 1: to this list because that's a big part of fallen
Speaker 1: soldiers today with PTSD. And so we took these names
Speaker 1: and I stayed away from anything beyond the name until
Speaker 1: that day in Big Ben. I'd wake up, I would
Speaker 1: call the family. Sometimes it was a wife, sometimes it
Speaker 1: was a father, a mother, and I would FaceTime them
Speaker 1: and I would just tell them how excited I was
Speaker 1: to start the day and that this day would be
Speaker 1: all about their son or husband. And I learned, as
Speaker 1: the viewer learned, just who they were. And I'm so
Speaker 1: proud of this film. I hope that a lot of
Speaker 1: y'all have watched it. If you haven't, I also made
Speaker 1: this as easy as possible to watch. It's not subscription based.
Speaker 1: You don't have to pay for it. You don't have
Speaker 1: to do anything but go to YouTube and search Granger Smith.
Speaker 1: They Were There, a hero's documentary. It's for free, and
Speaker 1: I wanted it to be like that. I wanted it
Speaker 1: to be where everyone if they wanted to check this out.
Speaker 1: It's about forty five minutes long. I wanted you to
Speaker 1: go and be able, on your own time, on your
Speaker 1: own couch at your own house, to go to YouTube
Speaker 1: and check this out. And I encourage you to watch
Speaker 1: three or four minutes. And I hope that if you
Speaker 1: just dedicate three or four minutes to it, then you're
Speaker 1: gonna get sucked into it and ended up watching the
Speaker 1: entire film and then let me know what you think.
Speaker 1: It's a very very important project to me. I've been
Speaker 1: playing the theme song called They Were There that I
Speaker 1: wrote with some of my great friends, including Mitchell Timpenny
Speaker 1: and an awesome artist himself. I've been playing that song
Speaker 1: live when this came round tour, and last night when
Speaker 1: we played it in Memphis, it just kind of kind
Speaker 1: of brought the house down. It was just crazy, everyone
Speaker 1: lifting up their phones and the lights on their phones.
Speaker 1: And it's a powerful song with a different message than
Speaker 1: any other soldier song, because this is from the civilian perspective.
Speaker 1: This is a song about while we were here, living
Speaker 1: our lives, doing these mundane things, all the while, there
Speaker 1: are people over there right now paying for this freedom.
Speaker 1: Here's a song called they were there. We were here,
Speaker 1: blowing out birthdaycads, riding our bikes, jumping in legs, feeling
Speaker 1: butterflies on our first dates, and stealing our old man's beard.
Speaker 1: We were here back home and the home and the bridge,
Speaker 1: but the breath ain't home. There's been notion away doing
Speaker 1: their job and keeping us safe. While we were here,
Speaker 1: they were there, fighting back on the front line, strapping
Speaker 1: up their boots before the sun rites, keeping their mamas
Speaker 1: up full night in field. They were there in the
Speaker 1: name of a hometown of the last name that was
Speaker 1: passed down every day, every night, every moment we were here,
Speaker 1: they were there. They were there. We were here, singing
Speaker 1: the floods of the league and repeating those words, not
Speaker 1: knowing their meaning, taking for granted all our freedoms in
Speaker 1: the land of the free. We were here bitching batmanimum wage,
Speaker 1: splitting ourselves in the Red and Blue states, we still
Speaker 1: sat down hot food on the plate. Yeah hour, we
Speaker 1: were here. They were there, fatting back on the front lines,
Speaker 1: coming up their boots before the sunrise, keeping the marbles
Speaker 1: up at night in seeing. They were there in the
Speaker 1: name of a hotwn of the last name that was
Speaker 1: passed down every day, every night, every morning. We were here.
Speaker 1: They were there. They were there. They were there, given everything, man, God,
Speaker 1: they were there. Some came home in a pine wood
Speaker 1: box with those stars and strips on top. They were there,
Speaker 1: fatting back on the fun line, scrapping out there Bruce
Speaker 1: before the sun lights, keeping their mama's up phone nine feed.
Speaker 1: They were there in the name of a hometown, of
Speaker 1: a last name that was passed down every day, every
Speaker 1: night of the malling we working. They were there. They
Speaker 1: were there, and you can watch this full documentary on YouTube.
Speaker 1: Just searched. They were there. Granger Smith, I hope you
Speaker 1: like it, and please give me your feedback. It's important
Speaker 1: to me. Hey, thank you for listening to this podcast.
Speaker 1: If you want to help, if you want to hear
Speaker 1: more of these, then I'll tell you exactly how you
Speaker 1: could help. Me, tell your friends about it, and go
Speaker 1: on at whatever streaming device you're using. Give it a
Speaker 1: good rating. That helps me. This podcast is brought to
Speaker 1: you by EEEE Energy. That's my official, unofficial energy drink.
Speaker 1: I'm actually drinking one right now and I will be
Speaker 1: tonight before the show. As I always like to point out,
Speaker 1: this is an energy drink that my brothers and I
Speaker 1: made from scratch. We took several different recipes and we
Speaker 1: kind of decided the best one for us that we liked. Actually,
Speaker 1: people were asking me last night was it taste like
Speaker 1: Red Bull or Mass And I said, it's not tanging
Speaker 1: like Red Bull, and it's not as fruity as Monster.
Speaker 1: I like to think that it's just right the Goldilocks drink.
Speaker 1: Check it out at eye energy dot com or Amazon Prime.
Speaker 1: At the end of episode fourteen, and by the way,
Speaker 1: I'm still kind of telling my story of where I
Speaker 1: came from and how I got to where I am now,
Speaker 1: and it's collectively through all these past episodes. So if
Speaker 1: you're brand new to this podcast and you're just starting
Speaker 1: right now with episode fifteen, you might have to catch
Speaker 1: up just a little bit, because at the end of
Speaker 1: episode fourteen, the timeline of the story I was telling
Speaker 1: was in about twenty eleven, and I was talking about
Speaker 1: how I put out a record called Poets and Prisoners.
Speaker 1: I was very proud of it. I still love that album.
Speaker 1: It's still such a time piece for me at the
Speaker 1: time and where I was in my life, as all
Speaker 1: my albums are, but that particular one wasn't doing great.
Speaker 1: It wasn't getting a lot of attention. I think people
Speaker 1: liked it, but they did not a lot of people
Speaker 1: knew about it, and no one really bought it, and
Speaker 1: no one was coming to the shows. It wasn't translating
Speaker 1: to ticket sales, and all that was about to change
Speaker 1: with one show. And that's how I ended episode fourteen,
Speaker 1: was saying that, and that is true. Now three things
Speaker 1: were about to happen for me in this twenty eleven window.
Speaker 1: These are three major things that started moving my career
Speaker 1: at a rapid pace. Number One, I recorded a live record.
Speaker 1: It was in College Station, Texas, one of my favorite
Speaker 1: old historic bars called the Dixie Chicken. I decided to
Speaker 1: call it Live at the Chicken. I was so nervous
Speaker 1: about this because you only get one chance. But I
Speaker 1: had my entire band travel with me to a hotel
Speaker 1: in the middle of nowhere the night before, just so
Speaker 1: that they wouldn't go party too hard and be too
Speaker 1: hungover to play a good record. It might have been overkill,
Speaker 1: but they did really good, and I was really proud
Speaker 1: of how this record turned out. I mean, we brought
Speaker 1: all this gear and recording stuff into this little bitty
Speaker 1: wooden bar and packed it out with some of our
Speaker 1: best fans that knew exactly what we were doing that day,
Speaker 1: and just have a really good memory and an album
Speaker 1: to show for it. And still to this day, it's
Speaker 1: the only live album I've ever done. I didn't know
Speaker 1: it then, but that album Live at the Chicken That
Speaker 1: kind of marks the end of an era for me,
Speaker 1: because things were changing rapidly for me. I was writing songs.
Speaker 1: As I talked about in at the end of episode fourteen,
Speaker 1: I had talked to a couple of indie rock record
Speaker 1: labels that wanted to sign me. And when I really
Speaker 1: thought about everything and kind of dove into where I
Speaker 1: was in my career, I realized I could possibly be
Speaker 1: on a misleading path. I was a country artist. I
Speaker 1: loved country music, and that's what I wanted to do.
Speaker 1: And so it was time to solidify myself as a
Speaker 1: country music artist without a shadow of a doubt, to
Speaker 1: make sure that my music and my lyrics screamed country,
Speaker 1: because that's who I was. And I could pinpoint the
Speaker 1: exact time when all of that became very real to
Speaker 1: me in my head. It's because I was at a
Speaker 1: place when I was ready to write songs. I was
Speaker 1: ready for a new album. I was ready for the
Speaker 1: granger that was going to bust through, that was going
Speaker 1: to finally have a lot of fans. And so I
Speaker 1: was in that mindset and we played this show at
Speaker 1: private party. It was in the middle of nowhere. The
Speaker 1: closest town was bass Drop, Texas, but it was still
Speaker 1: about fifty miles from bass Drop, And it was this
Speaker 1: tiny dance hall that was used only for private parties.
Speaker 1: And there was no bars, there was no hockey tonks,
Speaker 1: there was no dance halls open to the public anywhere
Speaker 1: near this place. And during the party, one of these
Speaker 1: guys was talking to me and I said, man, what
Speaker 1: do you around here? What do you guys do for fun?
Speaker 1: What do you I mean, where do you go? And
Speaker 1: I'm thinking, where do you go drink beer? You know you.
Speaker 1: Where do you go? Dance with the girls? And it shows.
Speaker 1: It just shows that I had been touring so long
Speaker 1: in this van and trailer, I'd been beating up this
Speaker 1: honky tonk circuit that I had forgotten my roots. I
Speaker 1: had forgotten what I did in high school. I've forgotten
Speaker 1: what I did in college. All I knew was where
Speaker 1: I was currently playing, and that was so ingrained in
Speaker 1: my mind. This guy looked at me like I was crazy,
Speaker 1: and he said, where do we go? We do it
Speaker 1: in the field, in the little Betty town between min dots.
Speaker 1: We don't tell get in a parking lot. We bump
Speaker 1: down their roads and jack dump trucks. Far from the
Speaker 1: bars and smoky nightclubs. We do it in a field,
Speaker 1: rocking all night until the sun comes up. We got
Speaker 1: a hundred blue Cans sitting all ice on the back
Speaker 1: of my club and George Stream playing it in a
Speaker 1: chevro Laine. We're opening on the doors wide and let
Speaker 1: it play. We do it in a field, rocking all
Speaker 1: night until the sun comes up. A few days for
Speaker 1: that conversation, I wrote, we do it in the field,
Speaker 1: And to whoever that was that I talked to that day, you, sir,
Speaker 1: saved my life. And you know, in this business, in
Speaker 1: this career, it has taken several times. There's many times
Speaker 1: like this in my life where I needed to get
Speaker 1: hit in the head with a hammer to remember just
Speaker 1: what the hell I'm supposed to be doing, because as
Speaker 1: all of us, in all of our lives, we can
Speaker 1: get so micro focused on what we think is right.
Speaker 1: And as they say, you could start climbing the ladder
Speaker 1: and then once you get to the top, you realize
Speaker 1: the ladder was leaning on the wrong building. That's kind
Speaker 1: of what I was doing. So thank you, buddy for
Speaker 1: clocking me in ahead. I needed that. One Are we
Speaker 1: Doing in a Field? Ended up being the exact identity
Speaker 1: that I was stepping into, and it would soon be
Speaker 1: the lead single off of a brand new project of mine.
Speaker 1: So all I had was this song, and so many
Speaker 1: of the other songs off of what would become Dirt
Speaker 1: Road Driveway kind of started falling into my lap I was,
Speaker 1: I was writing them, and in the meantime, as I
Speaker 1: was kind of recording and getting ready, Tyler and I
Speaker 1: my brother who's my manager still is still the best
Speaker 1: manager in country music. He might get mad if I
Speaker 1: say that the best manager in music, he would probably prefer.
Speaker 1: But we're going over ways to launch the new me,
Speaker 1: the you know, the how do we launch outside of
Speaker 1: our small, tiny region that we're living in. How do
Speaker 1: we become more than just poets and prisoners? How do
Speaker 1: we reach people? So we had a vision of going
Speaker 1: viral on YouTube and not you know, no one wanted
Speaker 1: to see me sit there and talk on YouTube, So
Speaker 1: we wanted to do some serious stuff, some of the
Speaker 1: stuff from Bootwalk in Iraq, some music videos, and some
Speaker 1: funny videos. And a lot of the funny videos although
Speaker 1: it's me is you know in the video it's Tyler
Speaker 1: uh with the vision and what's you need about some
Speaker 1: of these funny videos that we started doing was that
Speaker 1: they if you notice, they don't play any music at all.
Speaker 1: It's just it's some kind of silly skit and at
Speaker 1: the end it just tags really quick grangersmith dot com,
Speaker 1: so that if it goes viral and it spreads, then
Speaker 1: people would ultimately say that's kind of funny. Well is
Speaker 1: there more? Oh there's a website, click on that. Oh
Speaker 1: it's a musician and he sings songs and hopefully that
Speaker 1: you like them. You know that was the goal, and
Speaker 1: we set our sights on one million views. That was
Speaker 1: so far then past anything we had ever done. We'd
Speaker 1: put out a lot of videos up until this point,
Speaker 1: but nothing even close to a million, But that was
Speaker 1: the goal. We knew it was going to take one
Speaker 1: million views on YouTube to make a dent remotely and
Speaker 1: to even think about going back and relating to the music.
Speaker 1: So that's what we wanted, and that's what we dug
Speaker 1: our heels into. And if you search YouTube for me,
Speaker 1: you could find all kinds of old videos, like Live
Speaker 1: with Lionel. That was a really funny one. I thought
Speaker 1: that was really funny. He says a super awkward interview guy,
Speaker 1: and it didn't get it didn't get a whole lot
Speaker 1: of exposure. We had a Mexican restaurant owner named Freddie,
Speaker 1: and I loved Freddy. I still love Freddy. I think
Speaker 1: he's an absolute rock star. I actually think we're going
Speaker 1: to see more from Freddy in the future. But he
Speaker 1: didn't get a lot of views. We had Don't Touch
Speaker 1: the Turtles, which is this old redneck guy that has
Speaker 1: an affinity for saving sea turtles. We like that one.
Speaker 1: I thought that was funny. Once again didn't get that
Speaker 1: many views, and we had Cribs. We had an episode
Speaker 1: of Cribs where I'm in this old, broke down house,
Speaker 1: and that one did pretty good. Actually, that didn't get
Speaker 1: close to a million. I think it has over a
Speaker 1: million now, but back then it was kind of another
Speaker 1: slow growth video. All this was leading into what you
Speaker 1: guys are probably thinking. Yes, what you're thinking is right.
Speaker 1: I didn't know it. But during this time, during this
Speaker 1: experimental time filming a lot of videos, usually Tyler be
Speaker 1: on the camera and I would take the footage and
Speaker 1: go back on my little laptop and edit all these
Speaker 1: by myself. I was barreling towards a huge career explosion
Speaker 1: and things. That might be an understatement, because things absolutely
Speaker 1: blew up for me because of what we were about
Speaker 1: to do. And as far as I know, it was
Speaker 1: such a simple idea. As far as I know, it
Speaker 1: was just a voice that I had. I had talked
Speaker 1: in this voice. Tyler called it the country guy, and
Speaker 1: he represented some family members of mine, you distant cousins.
Speaker 1: We had some friends that talked like this. We interacted
Speaker 1: with bar owners and the honky Tonk circuit that were
Speaker 1: like this guy. And he was kind of a combination
Speaker 1: of all of them put together. But what he became
Speaker 1: and what we shot that day out there at my parents'
Speaker 1: place in Central Texas changed everything for me. In fact,
Speaker 1: it's probably the reason you're listening to this podcast is
Speaker 1: because somewhere along the line, the chain reaction started with
Speaker 1: this video. It's crazy. All right, don't get mad at me.
Speaker 1: You're gonna get mad at me. But I'm going to
Speaker 1: end the podcast here because this next episode, episode sixteen,
Speaker 1: has a lot of information and I want to dedicate
Speaker 1: the whole thing to it because it was a part
Speaker 1: of my career that I like to call an intentional accident.
Speaker 1: We knew exactly what we were doing. We wanted a
Speaker 1: million views on YouTube. We knew exactly how to do that.
Speaker 1: We just didn't know that this was going to be
Speaker 1: the way that did it. And I'll tell you all
Speaker 1: about it next episode. Happ Inside out of the Blue
Speaker 1: scat in last Yeah, when it happenside nothing to you, Judy,
Speaker 1: even dude, the keeper round til the moon goes down
Speaker 1: in your back at your house, one thing with another,
Speaker 1: you love each other when looking you never look back.
Speaker 1: It happens like that Thanks for listening. If you want
Speaker 1: to support me or any other artist, the best way
Speaker 1: is to see us on tour. Go to grangersmith dot
Speaker 1: com backslash tour, See you down the road.