Drake White And The Big Fire headline The Bluestone on Friday, October 22. Doors open at 7pm and tickets are $30

 

Fate. Fate is how I discovered Drake White and his music. This is one of those cases where I wish fate hadn’t intervened but I’m glad it did. My oldest daughter, Liv, passed away suddenly on June 4, 2018 from an AVM which, essentially, causes arteries and veins in the brain to tangle and clot. A year later, my mom sent me a copy of People magazine which had an article about Drake White. I discovered that Drake had also had an AVM which led to a stroke. The inspirational story shared Drake’s story of recovery and it was then that I knew that I really wanted to talk with him at some point. Earlier this year, Drake announced tour dates including a return visit to the Bluestone and this conversation was put into motion. If you’d prefer to listen to the conversation, you can listen to it as a podcast.

You did some dates over the summer but this is this is the first time you’re getting back on the road, is that right?

We’ve been on the road. We’ve been doing dates, we’ve been doing fairs, festivals and shows but as far as putting together a tour and getting that on an extent to tour that is headline, that we are selling and promoting and going out, this is the first tour back from the injury and the pandemic. It’s super special.

Are you anxious, nervous, excited? Or, does this feeling like you’re getting back to your job?

The latter, man. I’m just really excited. It’s so life-giving to me to be able to get up and meet people and got on stage. For me, there’s no nervousness. This is what I was put on earth to do so it’s just like a deer jumping over a fence. That’s what he was born to do. I’m very excited to see the fans and get this new music out there. We’ve lived through a lot. I got out there and was able to make this record that I’m extremely proud of. So, releasing this record and getting back on tour is what makes me happy and I aim to be happy

Here’s my theory, and you can tell me if I’m right or if I’m way off base. It has more to do with my growing up. I didn’t start listening to “country” music until I was an adult. I grew up in the suburbs and my parents didn’t listen to country music. My theory is that kids, when they are growing up, are influenced by peers, parents, surroundings. In your case, did you grow up with parents who had country albums and southern rock albums? Did you grow up on a farm in a rural area or were you a suburb kid who fell in love with country music?

I definitely grew up on a farm in a rural area. My dad was a rock and roller. Classic rock stations became really, really popular when I was in high school so I started listening to everything from Steely Dan to Queen to ZZ Top to Lynyrd Skynyrd and Marshall Tucker Band and all these ’70s icons. Country was ’90s country and then getting into songwriting I loved Willie and Waylon and Kris Kristofferson and those guys. My mom and dad definitely always had music going around and being so close to Muscle Shoals a lot of that soul was in, but church was a big part of it too. The soulfulness of being in church and the spirit-driven kind of anointed stuff, I loved that sound as well. I’m not talking necessarily about the praise and worship stuff. I’m talking about the gospel. That’s where my palate of music was established. It was always so natural. “It’s not hard to be yourself” is one of my favorite quotes. I go towards the stuff that I like. I really enjoy that southern, swampy, soulful storytelling thing and the vulnerability of all that stuff. The music of the ’70s, I still consider it the best music ever made, from ’70 to ’75. That was kind of it for me.

I was a vinyl fan as a kid and then I followed the trend and bought cassettes, CDs and then digital music. But, now, working in my basement during a pandemic, and being able to find cheap records, a majority of them are from that time period you’re talking about. 

I think it’s cool to go in a world that is moving so fast, where everything is a 30-second TikTok video, to really go in and grab a vinyl record is something … I read this thing called The Outkast and it’s basically how Outkast busted into hip-hop and how they were kind of shunned by the industry. And then my buddy Charlie Worsham wrote an incredible piece, or had a great speech about the scenic route to stardom. I’m 10 years into this career. I’m 12 years into a 10 year town as Hailey Winters wrote that song. For me, I wouldn’t have it any other way. The plot has thickened and my story is coming out in these songs and vulnerability. That’s what my heroes did, that’s what it feels like I should do and what I am doing. I was raised on a cooler, sitting on a cooler in between two seats, getting people beer and listening to the great music. I love storytellers and I love the country side of stuff because I’m from Alabama where there’s cicadas and when you say somebody is young, you don’t say “Ah, they’re young”, you say, “Ah, they were knee high to a grasshopper.” Speaking in languages like that is stuff I’m obsessed with. I love the Faulkner-esque ways of going and writing and I love the grammar error. I don’t think of them as errors, it’s a flow for me and I’m flowing whether I’m freestyling to hip-hop top records, loving on Sublime and stuff that my sister kind of brought me on, or if I’m listening to old school country. I love everything in between, from Merle to 311, from Steely Dan to Limp Bizkit.

What I love about your music and what you’re doing, I don’t know if you consider them peers, but I really found an appreciation and love for bands like Blackberry Smoke who mix the same influences as it sounds like you have.

We toured with Blackberry Smoke for 2 years so I developed a great relationship with those guys. In my opinion, they are, if not the best, they’re definitely top 5 touring bands out there. They’re great, Charlie’s guitar playing and songwriting is phenomenal. This popped up a couple of times in my head while we’ve been talking. If the Eagles came out now, if Marshall Tucker Band and Skynyrd and ZZ Top, all those bands, if you look at the body of work Brothers Osborne has put together, that Cadillac Three has put together, that Whiskey Meyer has put together, A Thousand Horses, Zac Brown. The Eagles are country. That’s country, man. The geographical locations that we’re talking about – the cicadas, the crickets, and fishin’ and bobbers and falling in love and falling out of love, we’re also talking about the battle of good and evil, about the devil, about Hotel California. We’re talking about Stairways to Heaven and back and forth and in between. We also talk about the Bob Dylan side of stuff. The what’s going on in the world kind of stuff, the political side of things. That side of music is being expressed.

It is the greatest time for being an artist. I don’t believe that the music industry is hard any more. I believe you go out there, you make records, you love on your fans, you start with your fans and you keep working until it’s undeniable. That’s always been my M.O. and the scenic route to stardom is exactly the one I’m on. It’s exactly the one I’m supposed to be on. I was supposed to have the stroke. I was supposed to get dropped by two different record deals. I was supposed to marry the woman of my dreams. I’ve had multiple band members leave. That breaks my heart because I love the bands that I’ve created. But you’ve got to keep going because life is good. I wake up in the morning with an optimistic attitude. It’s not a bullshit optimistic attitude because I’ve lived through hell in the last two years. I’ve lived through absolute hell and I don’t care. I’m not letting it conquer me. I’m going to go out there make music and my shows are going to be palatable and they’re going to vulnerable and people  might see me laugh, they might see me cry, they might see me fall off a balcony in Columbus like I did last time, who knows?

We lost our 17-year-old daughter, Olivia, on June 4, 2018 to an AVM. That was a term I had never heard of before. It came as a shock and surprise, it came suddenly. I was not aware of you until my mom, a year later, sent me People magazine and said, “I think this is the same thing.” I read the article and that was really the first time outside of our situation that I had ever heard of somebody going through it. Can you tell me about what happened and what you remember?

It was 2019, January, and I got a headache. I went and got an MRI because the headache persisted throughout the day. I went and got an MRI and that MRI showed I had a wad of veins and arteries about the size of a lime on the back right side of my brain. The doctor here in Nashville, his name is Dr. Miracle, he said that he thought he could get it embolized, which is glued shut. In a series of 7 embolizations, we went up through my femoral artery and glued it shut. We were full deep into that and I was about 50 shows in. I would literally get these surgeries and then within 48 hours I’d go out on stage. What happened to me with the AVM rupturing, there was only a 4% chance of that happening. It was very, very low. It was mitigated by blood pressure medicine. We were especially confident after I had done 30-40 shows. I think timing happened and Roanoke, Virginia happened. We had been on a USO tour, we had been out to Europe, we had been on the road with Zac Brown, we were about to go to Australia. It was a godsend that that rupture happened in Roanoke, Virginia because we were 5 minutes from a Trauma One unit.

I’ll back up a little bit. That wad of veins and arteries was obviously an AVM that I was born with and that headache, I wore my brakes out. I wore the bumpers off of it because I was very active, I was training, I did like to run, I did like to work out. I played football and baseball and stayed very active. AVMs usually happen, they usually pop up in 50 and 60 year olds by either death – they have a blood clot on their brain and it hemorrhages and they die – or they get a bad headache and go down the same road I went on. At 36, mine popped up because I had been pumping blood through that part of my brain forever. I was more active, I’d say, than most people.

My daughter had a headache, was not prone to having headaches. She was out on a date with her boyfriend, came home and said she had a migraine, went to bed that night and the next morning was, essentially, unresponsive. I appreciate you telling me about it because it’s all sort of a mystery to me. I feel like I’m swimming blindly so getting to understand it is helpful to me and you’re being a little bit of a therapist, to be honest.

That’s why I took the stance of the victor mentality, going out there and telling this story and sharing it. You get these whispers in your head, and I think they are from the devil. I think they are the whispers that say, “Don’t share your AVM story again. People are tired of hearing about that. You don’t want to take the victim mentality, Drake. People don’t care about it.” But, here’s the thing. Everybody is going through something. I can’t imagine you, brother, losing a 17-year-old daughter. That’s just insane. And, for some reason, God had me on this earth and decided to spare me. I believe that if you’re breathing on this earth, that means he’s not finished with you and that you’re not finished with the life that you’ve got. For me, to go out there and share this and do these interviews and podcasts, to be vulnerable and open to what I felt through the paralysis, that’s why I did the TedTalk. That’s why I did all this stuff.

As far as early detection of this stuff, you can’t detect fate, it is what it is. I believe going and getting a scan, an MRI, early in a kid is a reasonable thing. This thing has been in my brain my whole life. I’ve always been high energy, I’ve always done pretty good. There essentially has been nothing wrong. And there’s nothing that says that that headache that came on for me, because I was working out hard and eating good, there’s nothing that said that I couldn’t have gone to sleep just like your daughter did and woke up non-responsive and ultimately left this earth. It just didn’t happen to me. I’m so sorry, I deeply am, but I hope that you know that we have a choice to be inspirational with it and help people through it.

My buddy’s little boy is 8 and he was watching me limp, I have a little bit of a cowboy gait limp going on on this left side from the paralysis, and I said, “You ever seen somebody limp like this?” And he was like, “What happened?” And I said, “I got attacked by a grizzly bear” and I go into this story, I’m a storyteller, so it became this fable, this tale. I did get attacked by this grizzly bear, that grizzly bear is just in the form of a wad of veins and arteries. I am choosing – and you have a choice – to go out and be inspirations, we have a choice to go out and spread the good news. The good news is we’re alive and breathing on this earth. If you’ve got a headache and that headache persists over four or five or six hours, go get an MRI. It’s paramount to you living or dying. I had to go get one, I couldn’t even see. I couldn’t even open up my eyes. Every light, every noise, everything just hurt excruciating to the point – I have a high threshold of pain. You’re talking about somebody who weedeats with no shirt on (laughs). I couldn’t do anything. That’s where I’m at at it and my perspective is that I’m a little rough around the edges and burly and tough and this has made me empathetic but, at the same time, there’s a reason for it.

My last name is Midnight so when I was listening to “Hurts the Healing”, you say both my first name and last name in the lyrics, so I feel like that was some sort of fate.

I love that. Signs are everywhere, it’s whether we want to pick them up or not.

You’ve released a few songs this year. Are those part of a new album? 

We’ve recorded all the songs and our goal is to get this album out either towards the end of this year or Q1 of next year. It’s really just me being a perfectionist at this point and tweaking the songs until they’re perfect. I’m a perfectionist when it comes to this stuff as you might expect. Let’s go back to that statement we were talking about records. I love reading all the different creators and all the different line items in a record. It’s always been my intention to create music like my heroes did and also have my head on a swivel with new age technology like NFTs and all the bitcoin stuff that is coming around. I understand releasing singles and stuff that’s streaming, I get it, but I love records. I love when artists that I’m a fan of, I love when they release a 12, 15, 16 song record and there’s b-sides. I believe you should start with the fans and work backwards and I believe this is what the fans want.

Liner notes and thank you credits will all be part of your package?

Yes. It goes back to being yourself at heart. I think the AVM rupture trimmed all the fat from me and I just want to get closer to truth, closer to the bone, closer to death. I’ve always been a no-nonsense type of person. Well, I take that back. I love the art of telling stories and I believe you can’t let the truth get in the way of a good story but at the same time trimming the fat, I’m just doing what I think is cool. I’m doing what I think I’d like to hear on a record and that’s the way I make music.

Everything you’ve been through in the last couple of years, does that play heavily into the lyrics you’re writing for the new stuff?

Dude, how could it not? You don’t have to hang around me long to know how I feel. I’m not somebody who is going to talk politics, or I might. You’re going to know how I feel and so I have a lifelong relentless muse. You can’t go through a near-death experience and be an artist and it not find its way in some shape, form or fashion into your music, into your art. You can’t see angels in the corner of the room, you can’t literally be fighting for your last breath, you can’t see a woman literally give up everything without writing about that. This record is me coming out of that, is finding victory in that and it is finding the joy of going through paralysis and not being able to walk for 8 months. It is the joy of trying to learn how to play a guitar that I’ve played since I was 12. The joy of slowing down and seeing that putting on your underwear, don’t take it for granted. Because it was hard there for a while to put my damn underwear on. Alex, my wife, was right there beside me from everything from helping me to use the bathroom to feeding me to all kinds of stuff. I’m a man’s man who wants to go out there and kill the bear. I love to camp. I love to hunt. I love to fish. I love self-sustainability of going out there and building my own house, catching the fish, cleaning the fish, cooking the fish, and serving the fish. I want to do it myself. This stripped everything back to adolescence. I had to rely on people around me to help me get back to tying my shoes, to getting my underwear on. That’s a vulnerable spot.

When you have that vulnerability, you develop empathy. When you develop empathy, for me, you write better songs. You write songs that are just open and that people can relate to. And to people who have lost daughters in the midnight sweat and shaking, they can get a little peace. I’m not being darker here but if suicide has ever crept into people’s minds, if my songs help convince them to keep living and keep going, my gosh, what a beautiful life that I’m living and what a fulfilled day that is that I get to write and to be part of being on stage and make music and help people. That’s my life purpose.

Everybody seems to have some sort of Ohio story. What is your Ohio story?

It dates back to the Bluestone. Ohio has always been a very special place because, quite frankly, we could go right now and put 1,500 to 2,000 people in a venue. They always loved what we wrote and the flavor of music we put out into the world. There are so many different eclectic groups of people that live in Ohio.

My story would have to be that we had a big show at the Bluestone planned. I had my buddies from Country Rebel there. A lot of those songs that people have ate up on YouTube, like “The Angel from Montgomery” and “Can’t You See,” those were taken that day.

I’ve always loved to go to where my fans are hanging out, the Firestarters. A lot of times, Jenny Davis, who is over the Firestarters, she’ll call me and say, “Hey, they are at this bar if you want to go pop up, they’d love it.” I’ll just go pop up and have a beer with 40 or 50 fans. Well, I went and did that. I love libations, I love the comradery of drinking but I’ve never, as far as before shows and me jumping around like Eddie Vedder, it takes a lot of energy and a lot of balance. There’s a balcony around the Bluestone. I got through the whole show and we had rocked it. Let me back up. Before that, I had some drinks with the fans where I would usually take one shot before a show maybe, I took like 3 or 4 so I had already started at a pretty elevated level. I got up there, we rocked the show, it was really good. I jumped up on the speakers, which you’re not supposed to do. They are built stacks of speakers. I jumped up on them and I was going to make this jump up and grab a hold of the balcony and then pull myself up on the balcony. When I did, I was sweating. My hands were slippery. And I was elevated, a little overserved. I slipped on that balcony and fell about 25 feet on this fan. This ends well. I remember that my band at the time was kind of angry at me. I was like, “Hey, no excuses for me drinking a couple of drinks I shouldn’t have drank, but, man, it’s a show and I’m going to put on a show in Columbus, Ohio or Hokes Bluff, Alabama or Bahrain or Iraq. It don’t matter where I’m playing. In front of 2 or 20,000.

That show, the next time I came and played at Bluestone, I had a completely different band and I went in and at the end of the show I jumped up on the same speaker stack on the right side of the stage and I jumped up and I grabbed – I didn’t drink anything – I grabbed a hold of the balcony and I walked all the way around the little bitty lip on the inside of the balcony and I sang this song. That’s my memory of Ohio. The memory of Ohio is the mantra of my life. If you fall the first time, I will fall until the day I die trying to do it. I will just do it. That is my mentality. That’s the way I’m built. If you don’t like it, don’t come to the show. I say that to the old band members. I’m not an angry person about it. I’m a daredevil, always have been. I’ll do a backflip on a mountain bike or get on the motorcycle. That’s what I learned how to play a guitar for because I want little boys to look at me and go, “You know what? I don’t have anything fo fear.” That’s why I wrote “The Coast is Clear” God’s the only thing you’ve got to fear so keep going. Don’t be stupid and drink too much and kill somebody but, at the same time, life is quick. I’m going to have a good time and it is my nature to push the limit. I think music needs that. I think people need that. Out of body experiences that I’m trying to create, at Bluestone or anywhere across the country or world, I’m trying to create them every night. I’m pushing the limit every single night. That’s literally how I blew my own mind. The AVM exploded because I push hard every day.

That’s what you’re getting when you come to a Drake White and the Big Fire show. I just encourage people, if they’ve never been to a live Drake White and Big Fire show, come. It’s going to be the best show they’ve ever seen, I promise. And if they don’t have a record, get a record, get a t-shirt, because you’re supporting a good cause. We’re going out and doing a lot of things philanthropically and I just love doing it and I’ve lived through hell to continue doing it. I’m not special, but I’m very special too at the same time.