(gentle string music) - Sometimes, life gives you an opportunity to reflect on what you would do with a clean slate.

Our guest on this episode is Tennessee native, Drew Holcomb, singer and songwriter, takin' the nation by storm.

♪ But I've thrown away my compass ♪ ♪ Done with the chart ♪ ♪ I'm tired of spinnin' around ♪ ♪ Lookin' for direction ♪ ♪ Northern Star ♪ ♪ I'm tired of spinnin' around ♪ ♪ I'll just step out ♪ ♪ Throw my doubt into the sea ♪ ♪ For what's meant to be will be ♪ During his career, Drew Holcomb has emerged as one of music's great independent forces, pairing a formidable instinct for storytelling and an unrivaled entrepreneurial spirit with project's galore, including Magnolia Record Club and his partnership with Peyton Manning and Sweetens Cove Whiskey, a highly ranked Tennessee bourbon.

With his band, The Neighbors, he's released nine full-length studio albums over the past two decades, including his latest, Strangers No More, featuring their number one Americana single, "Find your People."

♪ You gotta find your people ♪ ♪ That'll call your bluff ♪ ♪ Who'll ride along when the road is rough ♪ With the band, Holcomb has traveled the globe with a catalog of vibrant, honest songs, and turned their performances into celebrations of community and collaboration.

Drew Holcomb has been featured in films, television, radio, magazines, and more.

He and his wife, Ellie, also a talented singer and songwriter, make their home in Nashville, and share a love of family, community music, and of course, Tennessee.

♪ It feels like home ♪ ♪ Like a Tennessee river in the morning ♪ ♪ Takes your breath without a warning ♪ ♪ It feels like home ♪ ♪ Like smoke risin' up from the mountains ♪ ♪ All the beauty surrounding ♪ Just before his European tour, we had the chance to catch up with Drew at home, in East Nashville.

Drew, this is such a treat for me, I'm a fan, and just what a busy, busy career you're having right now.

- Well, thank you.

I'm honored to chat with you.

- Yeah, You've been doin' this for a while though, right?

- Yeah, I have.

It feels like it kind of snuck up on me that that's the case, but yeah.

I mean, I moved home from Knoxville in the late fall of 2003 and decided to give this a go, and that feels like a long time ago now.

(Drew and Becky laughing) But made a lotta music, been all over world playin' music, and have made a life out of it, and I feel very fortunate.

- Well, you are a native Tennessean, and your music just is so personal to me.

It just feels so personal.

What was it like... You grew up in Memphis, right?

- I did.

- Well, tell me about that.

- Yeah, so I grew up, I'm one of 28 grandkids.

I grew up five doors down the street from my grandparents.

When I was two years old, my parents had another child, my brother's name was Jay, and I had an older sister.

And Jay had spina bifida, so we needed some help, so my parents bought a house down the street from my grandparents.

So I grew up in this very sort of busy, chaotic in a good way, family, a big family, lots of people, lots of moving parts.

My parents were very involved in people's lives and in the church, and I grew up singin' in the church like most people in the South.

And our alarm clock was Mom playin' old classic hymns on the piano.

That was sort of my earliest memories of music.

- Wow.

- My dad was a kid who grew up in the 70s that wanted to be in the band, and his dad said no.

And so he pushed me, and said, "You don't have to play in a band, but you gotta play music."

So I got my first guitar when I was in sixth grade, and music was just a very important part of life.

And obviously bein' in Memphis, music's a big part of the culture and the history there.

But, I was really like every other kid in the late 80s and early 90s, just listenin' to whatever your parents like and whatever's on the radio.

But I had a pretty idyllic childhood, minus a lot of the complications that came along with my brother and his life, and in and outta the hospital.

But that sort of brought some reality to a pretty idyllic childhood.

But, that's sort of the soil that music grew in me.

- And you would often, I read, travel from Memphis to Knoxville, right?

And you ended up goin' to school at UT?

- I did.

- Yeah.

So now that you've lived in all three areas of the state, how would you define that?

- You know, growin' up as Memphis folks, we weren't exactly taught to like Nashville, you know?

So we would go to a game every fall to Knoxville.

My parents had gone to University of Tennessee.

And that was a sort of tradition was every fall, we'd load up on a Thursday night, skip school on Friday, and make a long weekend out of it.

And in all those years of doin' that, we didn't stop in Nashville one time.

- [Becky Magura] Wow.

- Just, "There's the state capital," and on we go, you know?

So when I moved to Knoxville, I knew very little about Nashville even though I'd driven through it a million times.

So, you know, a Memphis kid, used to flat ground and the river and everything that goes along with that, moving to the mountains of East Tennessee and then quickly falling in love with bluegrass music.

And we'd go to these like pickin' parties and all this kinda... You know, it was very different style than the sort of blues, and soul, and rock-and-roll of Memphis.

And I didn't think much about Nashville until I started meeting a lot of Nashville people at UT.

And so then I started givin' Nashville a chance, you know, a proper fair shake.

But I did end up moving here kinda kicking and screaming- (Becky laughing) Just 'cause I was like, "I'm not movin' to Nashville, that's not my place," you know?

"That's where country music and Christian music is," that's all I thought of it, you know?

- [Becky Magura] Mm-hmm.

- So anyways, now that I've lived here almost the majority of my life now, and spent so much time in East Tennessee as well...

I have festival in Chattanooga that I've started, so I'm in that part of the state a lot as well.

And I go home a lot to see my family and play shows back home.

And it is a very diverse state.

Geographically, it's diverse; racially, it's diverse; economically, it's diverse; the economy's diverse.

But the common sort of thread I think is music.

- Yeah, I love that, I love that about just your experiences.

And we're here in part of your home, in East Nashville.

You've been in East Nashville for a long time, before it was probably hip, and cool, and- - It was definitely not hip and cool when I moved here 18 years ago.

- [Becky And Drew] Yeah.

- So what do you like about bein' a Nashvillian now?

- Yeah.

Well, I specifically like about East Nashville, I love the walkability of the neighborhood.

I loved, at the time, it was sort of a gritty place where you had to have a little hustle, you know?

A lotta the musicians that lived over here, it was the history of people like Guy Clark, and Towns Van Zandt, and Todd Snyder.

And then I met just a wonderful community of musicians here.

And it felt a little more like Memphis than the rest of the town did.

But then I quickly learned so many people have moved here to pursue music.

It's a town full of dreamers, you know, of people that wanna to create a life doing the thing that they love.

And that's unique, not every city's like that.

I mean, Austin's got a lotta that, obviously LA's got a lot of that.

- Right.

- But a lotta people that come here have a dream of some sort, whether it's to be a photographer or to start a start-up tech thing, or...

There's just a lot of dreamers, and I think that there's an energy to that in this city that has always been attractive to me.

And that's my story as well, you know, I had a dream of becoming a traveling troubadour.

- Mm-hmm.

- And this was a good place to give it a go.

- Yeah.

So let me ask you this.

You did a TED Talk, a TEDx Talk, about your dreams are not your own- - (laughing) Don't belong to you.

- Don't belong to you!

Your dreams don't belong to you.

- Yeah.

- Is that tied to... Tell me more.

- Totally, that's tied to my life and my story.

I think my general point of that Ted Talk was that in this celebrity driven culture, one person kinda gets the credit for the dream, right?

Whether it's the, you know, the Adele or you know, it's usually the artist.

But really, it's a team of people that, starting with your music teacher, or starting with the record that you listened to as a kid and the producer and the artist who made that thing, all of these seeds that get planted in us as people are a part of this community of creativity, you know?

So for me, it was in middle school, a music teacher that said, "You know, you know how to write.

You should try to write somethin' with music."

I'm like, "Okay."

I just held that nugget in there and didn't come back to it until four years later, you know?

- Wow.

- No great artist exists in a vacuum of individuality, you know, we're all part of a community.

And I think that that...

So for me, what that has translated into is sort of an ethic in my life of being grateful for and acknowledging the contributions of everybody on the team, you know?

The bus driver to the merch person, to the local person carryin' the audio gear in and out.

And then just a general gratitude of like, "Somebody created that, that's cool."

I don't know how to build a guitar, you know, I don't know how to code a guitar string.

And it's just the little minutia that's given me a lot of gratitude for how creativity sort of grows, is that it grows in a community of collaboration and creativity, even if people don't recognize it.

- Yeah.

- I wanted to play some of the songs for a good friend of mine.

His name's Thad Cockrell, he's an artist that I respect a lot.

And so I wanted to play the songs for him, get his feedback.

So I played three or four songs, and my wife Ellie, who was in my band at the time was there with me.

And I start playin' this song, and I'd sing it like this: ♪ Sometimes I wake up with the sadness ♪ ♪ Other days, it feels like madness ♪ ♪ So, what would I do without ♪ "Stop, stop, stop," he says.

I'm like, "Don't interrupt me," It's like, you know, "I don't want that much of your input."

So he says, "No, no, no, no, no, no."

(audience laughing) So he says, "No, no, no, no," and he gets literally right in my face, two inches from my face.

And he goes, "Drew, sing it to me like I'm right here.

♪ Sometimes I wake up with the sadness ♪ ♪ Other days, it feels like madness ♪ ♪ So, what would I do without you?

♪ And just like that, I had this entirely new palette to paint with that I didn't know was in me.

And it's that friction, artist-on-artist, spurs our creative growth.

And I see a lot of artists that they look in the mirror and see themselves as the great hero of the story, and I think that that's a pretty big miss.

- Yeah.

- You know?

- Absolutely.

It's so heartwarming, really.

And you're comin' off of a big tour.

It seems like you're always touring, it feels like, - Well, what day is it, where am I?

- [Becky And Drew] Yeah.

- So what's that like?

And that's gotta really extend out to lots of people.

- Yeah, yeah, it's really neat.

I mean, you know, our sort of MO is you get on the bus here in Nashville.

Like tonight, I'm gonna get on the tour bus at around 11 or 12.

We're gonna load up all our stuff in this trailer.

There's five people on stage, and then we have another five that are the crew.

So we've got our sound person, lighting person, tour manager, merch person, and tech.

And so they're gonna do all their jobs, load it all up, we're gonna go to sleep.

The driver's gonna drive us to Oxford, Mississippi, we're gonna wake up in a new town parked outside the venue, and we're gonna start our work, you know?

And in that day, I may have a few press conversations with somebody, or I may talk to the manager about, "Oh, you got offered this festival next May, do you wanna play it?"

And, "Here's the details of it."

So everybody's kinda got their roles and doin' stuff, and you get to soak up the energy of that place.

So Oxford, okay, small town, the venue's right on the square.

It's a college town, so it's gonna have a different energy than say three days later when we're pullin' to Fort Worth and we're playin' near the Stockyards.

- Wow.

- You know, Tulsa, we're playin' Cain's Ballroom, which is just about to celebrate it's 100th anniversary.

Then we're goin' to Waco to play a theater, which is a seated room, going from a standing room.

So every day has these different inputs, you know?

And so sometimes that can be overwhelming and exhausting, and other days, it can give you a lot of energy, that it's not just the same thing every day.

'Cause that can feel like that if you don't look around.

- Right, right.

- So this summer was very different for us because we were opening, those were all headline shows.

This summer, we were opening for the legendary Darius Rucker- - [Becky Magura] Mm-hmm.

- You know, who's had multiple hits across many genres and sold more records than just about anybody alive, back from his Hootie days all the way to his current country days.

And they were great, his band and crew were super hospitable, made us feel like family.

But those are different 'cause we're playin' these amphitheaters, most of which are kind of out in the suburbs.

- Yeah.

- And you kinda wake up and you look around and you're like, "They all kinda look a little bit the same."

But then you get to the audience, and the audience is what's always different, you know?

- Why is that?

- 'Cause people are different.

(Becky and Drew laughing) You know?

- Right.

- One day you're lookin' out and you connect with a family and they're really into it, and they're singin' along to every word.

And the next day, you look out and the guy's not payin' any attention to you and he's drinkin' a beer on his phone.

And so those two things can send you very different energies.

And so one, you're like, "I'm gonna win that guy"- - [Becky Magura] Yeah.

- And the other one, you're like, "Man, I'm gonna deliver this song to those people that are holding up, 'Oh, we wanna hear this song.'"

- Yeah.

- And so every... Because people are different every night, every show is different.

- Yeah, that's... Well you...

It's gotta be hard 'cause you're a pretty big family man.

You've got an amazing family.

- [Drew Holcomb] I do.

- Your wife's an accomplished award-winning musician as well.

And how did you guys meet?

- Well, we met at a pre-game barbecue, in Knoxville, before a football game.

The night before, a friend of ours had a big smoker goin', and everybody was hangin' out on the porch.

And she walked up, and I knew about her because I was a sophomore, she was a freshman.

And some of her friends that were my age had told me about, "Hey, there's this cute girl from our high school that's coming.

She loves music too, y'all should meet," you know?

And so I saw her, I acted like I didn't know who she was, tryna play it cool.

And she walks up and just says, "Hey, I'm Ellie, what's your name?"

I thought, "Oh wow, this is goin' great," you know?

(Becky laughing) And I said, "Well, I'm Drew."

And she said, "What'd you do today?"

I thought, "That's a pretty good question."

And I had just taken my first solo flight that day, I was taking flying lessons.

- Wow.

- And so I felt pretty good about my answer to the question.

I was like, "Well actually, I flew an airplane today."

And she laughed and we talked, and I didn't see her again for six months.

At another gathering, there's a group of people, somebody introduces her, she goes around, she gets to me and she goes, "Wait, we've met before.

Aren't you like a pilot or somethin'?"

And I said, "Yeah, who told you that?"

And she goes, "You did."

(Becky laughing) And all my friends talked trash to me about that for months.

So that's how we met, was me sort of humble bragging about my solo flight.

- I love that.

- Yeah.

- Do you guys write together?

- We have written together.

We've probably written, I don't know, maybe 10 or 12 songs together over the years.

But we really found that even though we're both musicians, generally speaking, for us to operate in our own creative lanes and then encourage each other in that has been a better sort of family dynamic for us than always writing and creating together.

- Right, right.

- So we do, and when we do, it's really fun, but we don't do it often.

- [Becky And Drew] Yeah.

- So, you know, the premise of this show, Drew, is that I'm gonna ask you this kind of fun question.

You're doin' so many things, you've got nine albums, I believe, out, right?

- Mm-hmm.

- And I wanna talk to you a little bit about your latest one, Strangers No More.

But, what would you do either personally, professionally, or within your community, with a clean slate?

- Yeah, it's such a... You know, when you guys asked me to do this, I got a little nervous about that question.

(Becky laughing) Because I think at the end of the day, I really love what I do and I'm grateful for it.

But it would be such an interesting exercise to look back and go, "What if I made a different decision at that point?"

And there really were two other options for me that I always kind of held onto as a kid.

One of those was pretty nerdy, but I wanted to be a history professor.

- Hmm.

- I loved to read, and I wanted to write narrative nonfiction books.

Books- - Wow.

- Like Hampton Sides and Jon Krakauer.

- Yeah.

- And, you know, books about the world, books about history, that have a narrative sort of tone to them.

And I thought, "Well, the one way to do that is to also teach, you know, Western civ and history of whatever you're interested in."

'Cause I was a history major and I loved it.

So I think in some ways, I could be sitting in some office in a college somewhere, writin' and readin' books, and meetin' with students, and living a very different life than I'm living right now.

- (laughing) Yeah.

- The other one was, I thought about joinin' the Navy and tryin' to become a pilot.

- Wow.

- So I was pretty far down the road tryin' to get an appointment to the Naval Academy.

And I had family in the Navy, my grandfather was a naval aviator in World War II, landed on aircraft carriers.

And I always had a romance and a story in my head of where my life was going.

And if I had done that, like a lot of kids from Memphis, I probably would've ended up workin' for FedEx and flyin' FedEx planes around the world.

- But- - Yeah.

- Those are two very different paths than the one I'm on, you know?

- Yeah, but how cool, because I have a feeling they both impact who you are- - They do, they do.

- Today.

- Yeah, yeah.

I mean, I think the history piece, the narrative piece, is a big part of my music.

People say, "What'd you major in?"

"History."

"Oh that's weird, you do music."

I said, "Well, they're of the same thing"- - [Becky Magura] Oh yeah.

- You know?

Telling a story, sharing a narrative.

Obviously for me, it's a little more personal.

And I would say if my music was in a genre of writing, it would be memoir, sort of a perpetual memoir.

And then the flying piece, I've always had this pretty high risk sense of adventure.

I mean, Ellie and I do a big trip every five years, and we've hiked 120 miles in the Alps, and we've climbed the Grand Teton, and done a bunch of fun, stupid stuff.

- Wow.

- So that's where the...

The flying thing was part of that too.

- Mm-hmm.

- I still fly.

Actually, in COVID, I got back in the air and I've been flying a bunch since.

And every time I take off, it's, you know, your phone's off and you're just, "This is magic.

I'm in the air, I'm flying," you know, it's crazy.

- Okay, so on Strangers No More, there's a song "Fly."

- Yeah.

- Is that your favorite song?

- It is my favorite song of the record.

It's funny though 'cause even though I do fly, I'm a pilot, I always have to make sure people know this is not a realistic song about flying.

This is a metaphor for like, disappearing into the sort of self-reflection.

- Yup.

- It's a song that off the new record...

When you write a record, for me at least, I always have a big pile of songs that I'm workin' from.

And I don't know what's gonna be on the record, but there's always one or two, maybe three, that I know the second I write the song and I'm finished with it, that that is going on the album.

And I not only knew that "Fly" was goin' on the album, I knew it was gonna be the first song.

- Oh wow.

- It was just like, "This is how I want this...

This is the front door of this album," you know?

So it's just a simple guitar lick that I wrote the whole song in 20 minutes, and it was just one that just came to me.

- Wow.

- It's a song about getting older.

I wrote it right after New Year's when we're all feeling a bit sort of nostalgic and angsty about another year under, gone, and another one, another mountain to climb up ahead.

And I really love the song.

♪ I'm gonna fly ♪ ♪ I'm gonna fly ♪ ♪ I'm gonna fly ♪ (gentle rolling music) - Yeah, I love it.

I think the album is amazing.

You wrote all the songs on the album, right?

- I did.

I co-wrote a handful of them, but yeah, I did write...

Except for one, one song "On a Roll," my guitar player wrote by himself.

- Oh okay, cool.

- Yeah.

- So let's go back just a little bit in the few minutes we have left.

You have another song that I love, called "Better Love."

- Yeah, you're takin' it way back.

- Yeah, it does take it way back.

So what is it about writing that pulls you into that moment and you can capture it in such a short period of time?

- Honestly, even asking about it, I feel like I can't answer 'cause it does feel a bit like magic.

- [Becky Magura] Mm-hmm.

- But the one thing I can say is that if you... For me, there was so much input of music into my own life.

At every pivotal moment of my life, when I look back, there's some important song or record to soundtrack that experience.

Whether it was getting your heart broken by your first love, whether it's the first time you lose someone close to you, you know, the first time you experience tragedy.

I remember I lost a good friend to a drug overdose in college, and it was just like my first experience with real like just sudden tragedy.

And I lost my brother, and music was a huge part of my sort of grief of losing him.

But then it was also a huge part of the fun road trips.

I remember, you know, when you learn to drive and, "What do you wanna listen to on your road trip?"

It's like, "Oh, we gotta put on some Tom Petty," and... - Yeah.

- Something about that was always in me and saying, "Give this a go, give this a try."

And I had no formal training, but I had a guitar and I had a lot of history of playing a bunch of songs that I love with my friends.

And I still, every time I finish a song, I just think, "This is crazy.

I can't believe this works," you know?

- (laughing) That's fun.

- It is really fun, it's really fun.

- Yeah.

- Yeah.

- I love songwriting, I just am so amazed at songwriters.

And so thank you for all the really decades of work you've created for us.

- Oh, thank you, yeah.

- You know, somethin'... Well, there's a couple of things that I really wanna ask you about.

One is how did you get into the whiskey makin' business?

(Drew laughing) - I love that.

Yeah, I...

So it goes back to my manager and I have been working together for maybe, I don't know, 12 years.

And I wanted him to manage me earlier than that, and he basically told me, you know, "I've got too many clients."

And I was like, "I'm gonna be your favorite client."

(Becky laughing) And he said, "Why?"

I was like, "'Cause I'm good at saying thank you," you know?

"And I'm good at celebrating."

- Yeah.

- So to prove the point after we started working together, that Christmas, I got him a really nice bottle of Jefferson's 18, which this is before Bourbon- - Blew up?

- Blew up.

So that sent both he and I on this sort of sidebar conversations about bourbon.

And he got deep into it, I started getting into it.

And long story short, going back to my days at University of Tennessee, I won a scholarship called the Peyton Manning Scholarship.

And to his credit, he stayed in touch with me all those years.

- Wow.

- So I get a call from him one day and he's like, "Hey Drew, I know you love golf, I know you love bourbon.

But some friends of ours, we bought this nine-hole golf course and we're gonna launch a bourbon brand out of it."

I was like... Talking to 12-year-old Drew, who is on the phone with Peyton Manning about being an investor in a nine-hole golf course and making whiskey, you know, to my tea-totaling evangelical parents (Becky and Drew laughing) would've been a shocking conversation.

- Yeah, yeah.

- You know?

So anyways, I said yes, and it's been fun to kinda get involved in a new venture that's completely different than what I do for a real job.

- So, you have a big heart.

I mean, it's evident in your music, it's evident in your touring, it's evident in your parenting.

You're quite an amazing philanthropist.

- That's just how I was raised, honestly, my parents.

To whom much is given, much is expected.

The kinda classic rule of thumb that you've been given this platform, they would say, you know, "If you've been given a platform, you gotta use it for good."

One thing that's been hard though is you get asked to do a million things, and it's so hard 'cause you wanna say yes to everything.

But you've got to focus in on what you really feel is near and dear to your own heart and what you feel good at.

And so we're learning, but we have tried... You know, we're good friends with Amy and Vince, and they are the king and queen of generosity.

- Well, we're so fortunate to have you as an artist, as a Nashvillian.

Thank you for everything you do for the community, and thanks for takin' this time.

- Yeah, of course.

Yeah, thanks for havin' me.

(gentle descending music) ♪ I've thrown away my compass ♪ ♪ Done with the chart ♪ ♪ I'm tired of spinnin' around in one direction ♪ If I could say one thing to Nashville, it would be, "I'm sorry I didn't give you guys a chance when I was younger.

I was wrong about this place."

It's a great place, it's a wonderful city full of great people.

And I'm honored to just be another person here that loves it and cares about it.

(bright descending music)