Daniel Donato Talks The World Of Cosmic Country, Grateful Dead, Psychedelics & New Album ‘Reflector’ (INTERVIEW)

Most touring musicians look forward to and cherish their time off from the road as a chance to unwind and revitalize themselves after enduring the rigors of cohabiting in tour buses and hotel rooms for months on end. Fortunately, Daniel Donato is not like most musicians. 

Inspired by some sage advice he received from local Nashville guitarist Chris Casello at the age of 14 – “in this industry, there’s no days off, just days less on” – Donato, now 28, has dedicated himself entirely to a musical quest for, as he eloquently puts it, “truth, beauty and goodness.”

Since venturing out on his own in 2018, after years of backing local Nashville country & western and rockabilly legends like Paul Franklin and Brent Mason, Donato’s ironclad determination has helped him take the live-music scene by storm, with nearly 300 live performances in 2022-2023 alone. 

Donato’s prodigious musical prowess has also been garnering the attention of his musical peers as of late, with a slew of notable live collaborations, including Billy Strings, Widespread Panic, Bob Weir, and Bill Kreutzmann. 

Now backed by his wildly impressive band, Cosmic Country, consisting of Nathan Aronowitz (keys/vocals), Will McGee (bass/vocals) and Noah Miller (drums and percussion), the Nashville-based guitarist/singer/songwriter is readying for the highly anticipated release of his quartet’s sophomore studio effort, Reflector. (out 11/10/23)

Consisting of entirely original material, a marked departure from his 2020 debut album, A Young Man’s Country, Reflector’s fifteen-song tracklist offers up an intimate snapshot of an emerging artist performing at a musical apex. Tracks like, “Till The Daylight”, “Gotta Get Southbound” and “Dance In The Desert” command the listener’s attention with Donato’s trademark psychedelia-infused honky-tonk sound that evokes images of George Jones swimming in a bathtub full of LSD at a Grateful Dead show.  

In a conversation from this past September, which has been edited for clarity and length, Glide’s Dave Goodwich spoke to Donato from his rustic cabin outside of Nashville for over an hour about a litany of topics including Reflector, the Grateful Dead’s influence on his musical ethos and getting dosed by Bill Kreutzmann and The Disco Biscuits’ Aron Magner before a show in New Orleans. 

Reflector is your first album to contain a track list of entirely original material. What led to that decision? Was composing an album of all original material a difficult process or easier than you expected?

I would say it was just a very real process. Things to me that are real are kind of fraught with duality. And one of those dualities that usually ends up happening is that some things are easy and some things are hard. Reflector is definitely an example of that, where some songs were very easy to bring into existence and some songs were immensely hard in the sense that they took a lot of time and space to settle on an intuitive level. So that was a trip on its own accord. Also, I didn’t really have as much to say on my previous releases as I do now. I kind of see life going in that direction. I find that the longer I do this, the more I have something to say. I actually feel like I’m incredibly late to the game to actually put out a fully original record because I’m 28 years old. I feel like I’m kind of years behind where I should be on some level.

So, the plan to abstain from including any covers was made at the very beginning of this process.

Well, the generation that I come from, it’s very pastiche. Everything that’s done now on a large level comes from something. I think I was a little bit too nail-on-the-head with my previous releases of just outright doing covers, but that was also kind of the world that I came from in Nashville, playing in the honky-tonks and just doing covers all the time. I’d always written music, but when I started touring all the time and we ended up doing hundreds of shows in one year, I really saw it. The original source was the wave to ride, and so this is kind of the first step in that direction. It’s fully intentional.

Reflector includes a pair of phenomenal instrumentals, “Sugar Leg Rag” and “Locomotive #9”.  I’m curious about the evolution of those. Are your instrumentals fully composed in advance or do they tend to evolve out of a live or studio jam?

I’m glad you brought up the instrumentals. That was something that I really wanted to make sure found its way onto this record because if you go and you listen to old Buck Owens or Merle Haggard records, they would always put instrumentals on them. So, that was kind of an homage to the older way of doing things in country music. That’s a big vision of what I have for Cosmic Country, which is for us to kind of exist in the three realms of time that you can, which is the past, the present, and the future, simultaneously. So that’s what those instrumentals serve in terms of the intention. Compositionally, they evolved through us playing them on stage hundreds of times. We just gave the music as many opportunities as we could to tell us where it wanted to go, and we would listen with as much reverence as we could to try to distill it to where they are now. 

We would start the shows off a lot of time with “Locomotive #9” because I view our live show almost as a train going through different sceneries and states. So that’s kind of what that metaphor is. “Sugar Leg Rag” is just a great homage to our keyboard player, “Sugar Leg” (Nathan Aronowitz). (laughs)

There’s a hilarious moment before “Sugar Leg Rag” where we hear someone yelling incoherently in the background. Who was that?

(laughs) That’s a fantastic question. That was our producer, Vance Powell. He was kind of frustrated with us because we all wanted to have this ridiculous voice come out at the start of the track and all of us, who are in our 20s, tried to start the track with a big “Yee-haw” or some sort of Old West-style introduction, and we just didn’t have the balls to actually have that transcend on the microphone. So, Vance just ended up saying, “Fuck it, I’ll do it.”, and he did it in one take. It was a brilliant moment. You just couldn’t believe that you’re actually paying money and you’re in a recording studio saying that into a $50,000 microphone, you know? I included it because we’re trying to cover as much of the emotional spectrum as we can. Just like a fantastic film does. There needs to be comedy and there needs to be drama, and those somehow have to be able to dance together. It’s really quite the challenge to pull off authentically.

Is there a challenge in trying to bottle up the live concert experience into a studio setting?

I don’t know if it’s as much of us trying to bottle up the live experience as much as it is allowing the live experience to inform what the studio recording can do. We had the privilege to play all these songs hundreds of times live and see where they wanted to go and how they came to life in the best way. So, when it came time to record them, all we really had to do was trim off some of the fat so we could package it into a listening format. The concept and principle that informed that whole process was, that when you’re at a venue, you’re in a completely different psychological state than you are when you’re listening to a record. All we were trying to do was take the principles and values those songs contained and have them fit the psychological state of someone who’s listening to a record as opposed to somebody who’s seeing and listening to it live at a show. That was one of the great endowments of working with Vance because he really helped us with that. 

What was behind the decision to split up “Dance In The Desert” into two separate tracks?

I very much look at songs as seeds of a movie. At our live shows, we don’t really stop when we’re playing. There’s not a lot of talking in between songs and telling stories about what’s happening. It’s more like a movie. It just goes from scene to scene. In our world of improvised music, some of the songs can take 180°s, and “Dance In The Desert” is one of those. I saw “Part II” as a dark thing. I just didn’t see it happening right next to the first part because, lyrically, “Part I” is kind of a hero’s journey with a positive ending. It starts out in the light, it goes to the dark, and then it ends up back in the light. But the second part of that song just kind of ends in darkness and it’s because the desert never really ends. The desert is kind of a metaphor for anybody’s existence, and that part never really ends. 

Who are the other members of Cosmic Country and how did your paths cross? Is there any additional instrumentation you would like to add in the future?

I would love to add a pedal steel player. Somebody who loves Ralph Mooney and Buddy Emmons and Shot Jackson and Pete Drake. I don’t know when that’ll be, but I do envision pedal steel in the band’s sound now. The lineup I have now is exactly what I asked for though. Will “Mustang” McGee plays upright bass, and Fender “P” bass. I found him on my birthday in 2021, when I turned 25 or 26. I pulled up to a session that I was playing on and this quirky guy with a big mustache and painted fingernails was playing a Paul McCartney line on an upright bass. I could just tell that we were kind of seeking the same thing and we had found each other for a reason.

At that time, Cosmic Country was still very much in a rough draft place. So, when Will joined the band, we ended up hitting the road pretty much immediately and after we played all these gigs together, we knew that the band needed to kind of level up. So, then we found Nathan “Sugar Leg” Aronowitz on keys. A critical part of the American sound of a four-piece band is guitar and keys. There’s something that happens there when you have an electric guitar that improvises with a keyboard player who also can kind of take those melodies and voicings to a different level. And I think that’s probably fueled by the McCoy Tyner/John Coltrane relationship of early jazz music in the 60s. Nathan had a drummer, Noah Miller, that he had been playing with for ten years in his own band, so he came out on the road with us and we ended up kind of reforming this band. I took all these songs that I’d written and composed, and I brought it to them, and they created this sound that only those guys can create. 

For the pedal steel on Reflector, we had Paul Franklin come and join us. Paul is the most recorded pedal steel guitarist in history. He’s played on over 500 number-one hit songs and thousands of records. He is just kind of “the guy” for Nashville pedal steel guitar. All the Alan Jackson stuff, Brooks and Dunn, Garth Brooks, Clint Black, Joe Diffie, George Strait – all these classic pedal steel riffs that you hear are Paul. He also played with Dire Straits back in the day and now he’s on all the Chris Stapleton records.

So, our producer, Vance Powell, who works with Chris all the time in a myriad of ways, made the call to bring in Paul Franklin on this record, which was an immense honor. Paul’s been doing sessions in Nashville for over 40 years. He’s really the end of the line when it comes to the greatness of pedal steel guitar. You can’t really have a top-five list of pedal steel players without mentioning Paul Franklin on there. So, he graced our record with his presence ideas and spirit on some of our songs. And he didn’t know any of the songs coming in! We only had him for four hours and he didn’t need to do more than three takes on any song. (laughs) And we have some complex songs. He didn’t even write out any charts. He’s just that great. 

You’ve mentioned that one of the reasons you’re able to handle your rigorous touring schedule is that you have a specific vision that drives you. What is that vision?

I want Cosmic Country to be a source of community. When something is communal, it’s alive, which means it’s always changing and developing and growing. I’ve noticed that there are some bands that are able to exist outside of the music industry. It’s still a musical experience but they don’t necessarily hold a lot of political power within the music industry, like Dave Matthews or Phish or Billy Strings or the cats that started it all, the Grateful Dead. It’s not like anybody’s really caring about what they wear on the red carpet. They don’t have big radio hits and there’s nothing that’s really tied to their success in their enterprise aside from their community and their music. That is the fuel for their trip. It’s not because some A&R guy found them put a bunch of money into them and made them this big success. I’m sure those tactics were tried, but the thing that really keeps them alive and keeps them going is the fact that it’s really a communal experience of people who are sharing the same idea. That’s never happened before in a live setting. When you say live music, what that actually means is living music. It’s happening there and it’s alive and it’s never going to be the same again. If you play a show on a Friday and a Saturday, the show you see on Friday is actually a different show than you would see on Saturday. And that’s how humans are.

So, the live show ends up kind of being this metaphor for the state of an organism. I really just want us to have a celebratory experience of living music and living truth. It seems like the only way to really do that is to take the good ol’ blue-collar American approach, which is to just take it out on the road and bring it to life as much as you can. That’s where we’re at now. We’re just playing as much as we can all the time to anybody who has the ears to hear it and the eyes to see it.

What do you do during your time off to unwind and decompress?

When I was 14 and I was busking on the street, I used to go see cats play all the time down on Lower Broadway in Nashville. There was a “lifer” musician who still plays all the time, Chris Casello. He’s a fantastic rockabilly guitar player, lap steel player and frontman. He told me one thing that probably will stick with me forever, which is: in this industry, there’s no days off, just days less on. And I find that to be very real. I really don’t have any time 100% off. There’s always something that I’m dealing with or working on. I always need to be a few chess moves ahead of where we are with our live show, so I can keep it alive and changing.

There’s always like ten songs or so that I’m composing or writing that hasn’t happened yet, and I use my time “less on” to really focus on those. I’ll get together with the band and we’ll work out harmonies and chords for these songs. Sometimes I’ll just write new songs. I also take time to really just recharge. When I’m out on the road, there’s kind of this duality of 100% social “on-ness”, so I’m always seeing people, playing for people, talking to people, signing things for people, or listening to a story that they have to say about how the music applies to their life.

So, when I come home, I have a cabin that’s about an hour outside of Nashville that I live in, and I really don’t see anybody. (laughs) I like to go on the trail near my house and I’ll smoke a spliff and walk around and just think about things, or I’ll read the Urantia book in the morning and drink some espresso and do some spiritual study. I really am kind of just like an athlete in the sense that, when I’m not on the field, I’m training for the field.

How has it been adapting to the larger rooms that are increasingly becoming a regular part of your touring itinerary? 

I think it’s been quite seamless in some sense. Externally, our crew is growing and our hardware is changing, but internally, everything’s kind of the same, and I think that’s great because we’ve built our community based on the values of truth, beauty, and goodness, which is all we’re going for. It’s a very human thing. So, the trip is kind of the same regardless of how many people are there because the social contract of what everybody is showing up for and agreeing to is the same. We’re just trying to make those three things come alive within the music, regardless of where it is or where we’re playing. And that’s really a fantastic thing because it’s not really scary as we’re evolving in our size. Like, when we opened up for Widespread Panic back in May, that was, I think, the biggest crowd we had played for at the time, but it felt like a club because, on a spiritual level, everybody is still just going for the same thing as we were in, say, Lincoln, Nebraska, last year when it was just 120 people. So, the zeros that are being added to the ends of the figures don’t really change anything. 

Though, there’s a big cross to bear with this kind of thing. For example, we just did a four-show run in Colorado and there were people that drove forty-plus hours to come see us. There were people that flew in for the shows and they came to every show that we did. So, every night has to be different and there is a lot of pressure there to try to really be honest with myself and make sure I’m not resting my laurels on anything that I don’t need to be resting them on, musically speaking. But I think that’s what I asked for here. Whenever you get what you ask for, you get two things. You get what you ask for and you get what you need. And you don’t always know what you need. So, that’s the great thing about the mentor that is experienced, is that you get what you ask for, but you also get what you need. And you don’t usually know what you need until you get it and you’re like, Oh, right. That’s kind of the duality here. And I’m starting to see that more and more as the trip goes on. 

In the last year or so, you’ve had the opportunity to collaborate with some incredible musicians including Widespread Panic, Billy Strings, Bob Weir, and Bill Kreutzmann. What have those experiences been like and who else is on your live performance collaboration bucket list?

Before I ever played live with those artists, I had already played with them in my mind in an imaginary sense. So, the thing that I think I’m reinforced with is that, whatever you imagine in a legitimate and pure way, it’s for a reason and it’s probably because it’s going to happen in the external world somewhere down the line. When I was 18 and living with my parents, I would play along to the Grateful Dead all the time and I would just imagine what it would be like standing next to Bob Weir with him to my left and looking out to a crowd of people and hearing him play and getting to react to that. When I got to do that in Memphis earlier this year, it was kind of like a ten-year delay between the internal and external worlds.

I would love to play with Willie Nelson. In terms of American storytellers, you really don’t find anybody who’s more influential than him. I would love to play with Bob Dylan. I’d love to play guitar for him. He’s always had fantastic guitar players in his band, specifically Mike Bloomfield, who helped take Bob electric at Newport Folk Fest back in the 60s and is a big influence on me. 

How much of an influence has the Grateful Dead had on your musical career?

I’m really weary to speak about the Grateful Dead in any way that’s declarative because I never got to see them. I just want it to be known that this is a purely subjective opinion. I’m a young kid that was born the same year Jerry died, so I don’t really wear any shirts with his face on it or anything like that because I wasn’t there. I really am only an outsider to that experience, and I’m just trying to kind of pry my way into it by playing with those guys, which is an immense honor. 

I listened to the Dead all the time, though I listen to them less and less now. When I was eighteen, my U.S. history teacher ended up giving me his entire bootleg CD collection of Grateful Dead stuff, which was everything from Robert Hunter and Jerry Garcia Palo Alto Coffee Shop recordings all the way to Soldier Field in ‘95. It was everything. It was the Pizza Tapes. It was the Legion of Mary with Merl Saunders. It was everything you could ask for, and it was like 300-plus CDs of material. So, when I was 18, I was listening to them religiously because that spirit of truth, beauty, and goodness that they summon into their music is my religion. It’s the vehicle in which I get my most reverential information and experiential data. I still listen to them, but it’s less religious now because I’m going out on stage and trying to take that spirit and bring it to life through my own music and with my own band and my own trip of life.

With artists like Margo Price, Tyler Childers, Jason Isbell, and Billy Strings, selling out large arenas and venues all over the country, it seems like the lanes of country music are blurring amongst the Americana scene. Where do you think your music fits into that spectrum?

Well, I think we fit in right there. With country music, there’s kind of this duality where there’s an “artistic country music” where things sound country. But then there’s also “commercial lifestyle country music”, which is what people who actually live country lifestyles listen to, and a lot of that doesn’t sound like country music on some level. Aside from Tyler Childers and Charley Crockett, a lot of the country music that people listen to, on a production level, sounds more like Tom Petty and rock and roll music. I don’t know why that started happening, but that began in the late 90s or early 2000s, when it kind of turned into this rock and roll sound. Whereas, the Americana thing is really music that sounds country, but it might not be for people that actually live country lifestyles. Like, you might not own a Ford F-150 and dip Copenhagen all day and work a job with your hands all the time, but you love the sound of country music. Those are kind of the people that we curate to because it’s not like people who were listening to Workingman’s Dead were actually country lifestyle people. It was a bunch of hippies, but they loved the sound of country music. That’s kind of where we fit in.

 I feel like we’re just a natural evolution from everything that’s happening. And I’ve been watching everybody that you mentioned grow. I remember Sturgill Simpson checked me out once when he was a cashier at the Turnip Truck. I remember seeing Chris Stapleton play at the Whiskey Jam for free. I remember seeing Billy Strings play on “$2 Tuesday” at the Five Spot. I used to sneak into the Mercury Lounge to see Margo Price play on a bill with five different bands before I was 21 and I would just throw a straw in my soda to make it look like it was a cocktail. So, I’ve been watching all these cats come up through the scene as I’ve been coming up through the scene. We’re all just kind of part of this wave in this space and time, and we’re all kind of serving the same purpose of trying to bring truthful, beautiful, good music through whatever genre we have to commercially classify it in. And we were all just kind of selected to do this task and we’re all just coming up doing our own respective thing at our own respective time, and we’re kind of loosely part of this community together and it’s really quite an honor to see. 

Commercially, I see Cosmic Country fitting in with Billy Strings more so than I do Charley Crockett and Margo Price and Jason Isbell because those acts, more or less, just do 90 minute shows and their sets aren’t that dramatically different from each other. I make that point intentionally because there’s a lot of work and effort that goes into the three-hour/two sets a night thing. Billy Strings is kind of the only cat that’s doing that right now who really is making any waves commercially. I could see Cosmic Country fitting in at the CMT Awards, but my vision would be for us to just end up doing arenas and I really couldn’t care less if we end up getting any press or we end up winning any Grammys or awards. Just as long as every show and every night is different and that it’s truthful, beautiful, and good for people. Billy Strings is an immense influence on me. We’re going to be hearing about him for at least the next twenty years. He’s here to stay and I love that he’s been able to do that at such a young age and I aspire to do something similar to that.

Seeing him play places like Nassau Coliseum and other arenas typically reserved for massive pop stars and rock bands is crazy, especially for a bluegrass act with no drummer. It’s been wild to watch unfold.

It’s really wild. If you’re really studious about Jerry Garcia interviews, like I am (laughs), he kind of called this. Back in the early 80s, he said, ‘I would love for us to just do fully acoustic sets, but the technology isn’t there yet.’ He predicted that one day the technology is going to be at a point where instruments and PA systems will be able to support fully acoustic American-sounding music in arenas. It just wasn’t there yet while he was alive. So I think in a prophesying manner he kind of saw this coming and it seems like Billy Strings was the writing on the cosmic wall of time. 

Billy Strings is quite the cosmic thing too, because his whole life he grew up kind of being set up to take on this role. He grew up playing traditional bluegrass with his dad, learning how to sing harmony and learning how to play rhythm before he played lead. It’s kind of like he stepped into destiny unconsciously on some level to do this. But I feel like he’s kind of the start of a whole new kind of music, which is American acoustic string music to tens of thousands of people, without drummers. He’ll probably go down in history as being the first guy to ever do that. It’s really just an amazing thing to witness in history.

Do you consider Cosmic Country a jam band? 

I don’t really know what a jam band is because when I listen to artists that are called jam bands, all of them sound different. We definitely improvise. Part of the logic that goes into Cosmic Country is that we’re an improvisational experience. I do think that people who like what they call “jam bands” would love Cosmic Country, but I don’t know if it’s really up for me to say that. Tom Marshall isn’t sold on the fact that we’re a jam band, and I kind of like that. (laughs) It’s really whatever anybody wants to call it to us. All I know is that we are three chords and the truth and then some. (laughs) Really, at the end of the day, that’s all we’re trying to go for.

If you could do a duet album with anyone, who would it be and why?

In terms of modern artists, I would love to do a duet with Sierra Ferrell, Billy Strings, or Charley Crockett. I would also love to do something with Willie Nelson. All of these artists speak from the same place that I’m trying to speak to, which is just this authentic place that is fueled by three things: truth, beauty, and goodness. Those are the three things that I look for in anything that is inspiring. I see those variables and principles alive in anything that’s inspiring, whether it’s a physical thing, like an engineered product or a design by Virgil Abloh, or whether it’s in music. I feel like it’s really simple. Those values are kind of eternal. I just identify with all of those cats on that level. I also think it would be really fun to do something with Trey Anastasio.

What other guitar players have played an influential role throughout your career?

Marc Speer from Khruangbin is influencing me a lot in terms of composition and tone. He’s kind of the only guy who’s alive that’s really influencing me right now. The cast that I’ve been really listening to lately are Django Reinhardt, Chet Atkins, Jerry Reed, and Ralph Mooney.

Cosmic Country is a four-piece band and I need to fill up a lot of sound, which means I have to sometimes not think as a guitar player. Sometimes I’m thinking as a pedal steel player, sometimes I’m thinking as a clavinet and sometimes I’m thinking as a percussion instrument. So, I’ll listen to a lot of music from Nigeria and other music that doesn’t necessarily have any interest in the public scope but can provide information on how to use my instrument in an innovative way. Chet Atkins and Jerry Reed, are just some of the best guitar players that country music ever had because they know how to serve melody and they know how to be a musical guitar player while also being quarterly and melodically intricate and unique.

What artist did you see the most in your youth before you became a touring musician and was there anything that you took away from their live shows that you’ve implemented into your own performances?

Oh man, that’s a fantastic question. I would go out and see music three to four nights a week with my dad but we really didn’t go anywhere aside from these small clubs and honky-tonks in Nashville. All of the cats that I grew up seeing, nobody would know. I got to see Steve Hinson, who played with George Jones during his crazy alcohol-cocaine years, play pedal steel. I got to see Willie Cantu, who played with Buck Owens from the start of Buck’s career, play drums. I got to see Brent Mason, who is one of the most recorded guitarists in history, play guitar. All of the musicians that I would go to see were cats who were in their 50s, 60s, and 70s who used to tour with Merle Haggard and Johnny Paycheck and George Jones and Waylon Jennings. They all basically just wore New Balance shoes and blue jeans and plain gray t-shirts and they set up their own gear and they would make fifty bucks a night and drink a Budweiser. But they were these legends to me in my mind, because they played on these legendary tours and legendary records and they had these incredible parts and approaches to music that I was always learning from. During their set break, when they would go outside to smoke a pack of Camels, I would go and ask them questions about what they were doing. I would even go and get lunch with them. We would go to Monell’s “Meat and Three” and we would get meatloaf and talk about what it was like touring with George Jones and Merle Haggard and what values they learned by playing in those bands. 

So it wasn’t like I was going to see Aerosmith and having these dreams of jumping from the top of a drum riser and landing on my knees with my tongue sticking out of my mouth. I was going to see my heroes because I was listening to them on records and I was getting to ask what they were thinking about when they wrote those parts. I also was able to play with those guys and sit in with their bands. I still talk to them a lot today. Paul Franklin being one of them. Brent Mason being one of them. It’s really wild. I wasn’t really concerned with any glamour or scale of entertainment when I was young. I was really just concerned with the spiritual effect of impeccable musicianship and incredible songwriting. That’s all I was really concerned with.

What role, if any, does psychedelics play in your songwriting and performing? Do you ever dabble with them before live performances?

The last time I dabbled with a psychedelic before a live performance was when Bill Kreutzmann sat in with us. Bill and Aron Magner, who plays keys with the Disco Biscuits and is a good friend of mine, brought this psilocybin concentrate to the show and we took a very, very small amount. Then Bill came and sat in with us and the whole set turned into this really strange, incredible experience. Otherwise, I don’t really dabble with psychedelics as much anymore, but I’ll say this. Psychedelics turned me on to the idea that there is more to this reality than what is physically represented to us externally. Simple as that.

Though, I would say the Urantia book is probably a greater influence on my perspective of what is known and what can be than psychedelics are. The reason I say that is because, now that I’ve had more time to really tour – and we have a lot of people who are on psychedelics at our shows – I see that psychedelics are not the answer for anything. People say you can take acid or you can eat a mushroom and you can go and meet God, and I just think people have no idea what the fuck they’re talking about when it comes to that because a lot of people take psychedelics and they still miss the point entirely. They still miss the point of the service and love and kindness to our brothers and sisters who are alive, which is the key lesson to learn down here. How to love and how to be loved. How to receive it and how to give it. And I see a lot of people take psychedelics who just miss the fucking point immediately. So, I don’t think psychedelics are really the answer. I think if you’re predisposed to be that open of a person, then psychedelics can be good for you, but it’s not going to be the vehicle that does it for you. I think all of the work is still internally driven and it’s a conscious effort on a daily, hourly level to maintain. So that’s where I’m at with psychedelics. I love them and they’ve influenced my songwriting and my musicianship in immense ways but to me, the Urantia book was a bigger influence on my psyche spirit, and soul than psychedelics ever could be.

What does the term Cosmic Country mean to you?

Cosmic Country is kind of like this tale as old as time. It’s the duality of things. If you think about what “cosmic” means, it essentially means what is unknown. And, “country” is more or less a vehicle for something that is simple and truthful. It’s kind of more or less known on some level. So you have this contrast of what is unknown with what is known, with what is complex and what is simple ,and it’s me trying to create a dance between those two things. Trying to create a dance between what is simple and what is not simple. Hence some of our really elongated, strange, improvisational moments coupled with some of our really simple songs. But the thing that ties them together is truth and trying to bring truth into existence through music.