PipemanRadio Interviews Citizen Soldier at Louder Than Life 2024

0:04 Hey, you have done to censure. For see wow for. You you why coup America. It's time for the Adventures of Pipeman on W four C why dot com wis Pompeach is number one Internet radio station. Here's your host, the HiPE man. I'm trying to stinking of this coasting uppc how kind of learn how the vocast tell you honest? This is not yet I'm going through the worst man. I am mass I paid an filler team my time. No, I want the city of the side White Man. Here on the Adventures by W four C Y Radio, and I'm here.

1:01 With Jake from Citizen Soldier. This Matt Citizen Soldier is this Cooperjuanita. Kyle Nice here at Louder than life or rainier than life or but it's cool today. It's just like a nice little Amsterdam drizzle here. That's what I'm gonna call it, because I was in Amsterdam for two months last year and it was exactly like this every day all day. Well, we can handle rain like this, man. It seems like the further east you get, the less bad it gets. But rain out in Salt Lake is pretty brutal. It's a lot colder and heavier. It feels like the shit. Nice. You should have been here yesterday. Oh I bet it was worse. Yeah, it was not fun yesterday. But we missed everything yesterday.

1:45 So thankfully you're here today to play because not one band played yesterday. Hurricane Helene or whatever her name is, she showed Kentucky what she was made of. Helen's not a rock fan. No, I gotta say too, Like, last time I saw you had blue hair and I'm looking at his blue beard, and everybody always said to me, hey, you should do your beard blue, and I'm thinking myself, but he did it the smart way. I'm like, yeah, I don't want to eat that shit, But he did the smart way. Because you get ridvd of stuff that goes. In your mind, go meet to it. You have to do it. So how hard is it to keep the beard? I know how the hair is.

2:25 It's a full time job now, right. That's why I went back to natural color, because like, hey, it is a full time job. So you guys got a brand new song that just dropped recently. Tell us the story behind that song. Yeah, the song that just dropped recently is called to Live Again. And I wrote that song with Johnny Andrews, who's a pretty prominent writer in rock. He's written with Three Days, Gray, Sail Storm, a lot of big bands, and it's just a song about anyone who's ever been in a place where they feel like they're kind of stuck in that numbness, whether or not. A lot of people that I work with as a therapist who go through horrible things, the way that they cope is they just shut their emotions off. But you learn pretty quickly, yeah that's me. You learn pretty quickly that that's not a great way to live either. And so it's about that struggle of that moment when you're like, yeah, this is a way to escape the ugly stuff, but the ugly stuff might be worth being able to feel the good stuff too, And so the song's about that and we're really happy with it. And right before it, we released a song called Burden that was number one on the rock iTunes charts, which is the first for us, which we're super excited about. So, yeah, things are going well.

3:31 That's cool, and yeah, how do you know that about me? Like I do? I literally say that. It's like I have this switch, I just turn it off and it's like the vampires on those TV shows. They turn off their humanity and then somebody specialized to grab them out of fucking hell. What's interesting about that, though, and I talked to clients about this all the time, is there's like this misunderstanding about dissociation because that's what we're talking about, right, is numbing out, checking out, turning it off. We're like, it's really just it's just an emotion, Yeah, it's And we talk about grounding, and I think people view grounding as like, oh, when I'm anxious or angry or stress, but there's also grounding out of the low the blue emotions, sadness, hopelessness, association.

4:15 And so I think it's really cool in therapy to see people realize like, oh, there are things I can do every day to like help my body. Know, Hey, we're grounding up out of this numbness. We're getting back inside of our bodies. Because that's the way people cope with their pain, man, is they just turn into a ghost. They just leave their bodies and shut the emotions off, no doubt. And my other one, my other coping tool, since I'm like a teenager, is burying myself and work like because while you're working, like even this doing interviews, I'm not thinking about any of the personal bullshit that's bothering me because I just go into the zone and stay there, and then later then it's okay.

4:56 I can't tell you how many times my advice to a close is you need to slow down, and you need to keep a log and practice noticing what's going on in your body, what you're feeling, because I call that toxic productivity. I need to keep myself as busy as possible so I don't have to think about what's bothering me or what I'm feeling. And I notice a lot like people tell me they're angry, I'll oh, I'm such an angry person, And I always kind of laugh because I'm like, anger is a secondary emotion, You're burying something there. But I do that too, man. I notice that when I'm dealing with some deep sadness or difficult emotions that I'll keep myself occupied and busy so I don't have to deal with it. I think we're all, especially Americans, I think we've become expert of voiters. You know, we have smartphones, we have a million different things to keep our attention and So I think therapy is a great tool to remind people like it's okay to slow down and feel what you need to and work on your stuff.

5:48 What advice would you give kids nowadays because they're going through a lot of hell in this world and that there's a lot of stuff going on. I personally had my own experience really with that. How do you stop them from crossing line? Like I talk about when I was a kid, there's that line you didn't cross, you'd go crazy. But nowadays I find kids just like jump right over that line. They don't even know line is there. I this is This might be an unpopular answer, but I think it starts with parents having good boundaries of social media. I don't think having a smartphone a decade before your brain is even fully developed as healthy in any way.

6:29 I agree, But I. Also think like the beauty of social media is, like you're seeing these younger generations, they're really smart, Like they they're really tech savvy. They have higher levels of emotional intelligence in a lot of ways. So like, I think that really teaching kids about how to manage those emotions, how to check in on themselves, how to take care of themselves from a young age, how to be self reliant, self sufficient. I think that's huge. Like I am seeing adults in their forties who I like. I spend the first few weeks of therapy talking about self regulation, like when are you going into hyper arousal? When are you going into hyper arousal? Which types of emotions exist in both spaces? How do you ground? That's like basic therapy one oh one. And there are adults who just have never been taught how to regulate their emotions. That's just not part of we grow up and we take all these classes in high school and college that are meaningless that we never use again, but we're not taught about how to manage our emotions, which you see ninety nine percent of the problems in society are because people are hurting and don't know how to manage their emotions and they do things they're tragic.

7:33 And it happens a lot in music too. So I want to hear what your band members think about having a therapist as part of the band. Yeah. I think it's great. It's helped create a healthy culture with our band members and the fans, Like it's just a fun experience to see that that group of people we all have issues and are hurting, but we're all there together. Now. Do you feel or anybody can answered. Do you feel that having that allows you to be a better band, because how many bands have that band drama going on? It's usually from the therapy they all need.

8:15 I think it definitely helps. I think with what Cooper said, helps with the culture of the band. I think it also helps the five of us. It's like it's like a brotherhood, right, and like you kind of learned that we can be vulnerable and speak how we're feeling with each other and be open and half. We've had some really hard conversations in this band, like probably ones that would break up other bands, but we feel like we can have those with each other and be safe. And I think a lot of that does come with Jake and his practice and what he brings to the band and setting. That culture very cool anybody else. Now, I just have something we are talking like, so I think of when Metallica did the therapy, and even though it was all public and stuff, I think about them playing now, and that's somebody that saw them way back the first show. Ever, I look at them now and I think they're a healthier band than they've ever been in the past forty years. What's your opinion, because I don't see the background of it or an expertise way you see.

9:18 I can't speak specifically to the band because I haven't seen a whole lot of content on them recently. But I do think that like when you suppress frustrations for that long, Yeah, it gets harder and harder to untangle that web of resentment. You know, the faster you're able to catch things and jump on them and talk through them, the easier it is usually to resolve them. So, whether it's a band or a couple or a family, I mean, it's crazy, just like in my social circle at home to see like couples who have been together for twenty thirty years that are still like, oh my husband does this and drives me crazy and I just can't tell them, and I'm like, you've been with this person for three decades and you can't have this. I think if people knew how to have hard conversations, I think that I would also be that's an incredibly healthy tool, because when you don't do that, it just damages the relationship in so many ways, and just it's not worth the damage that it does to just get out of your comfort zone and just say those hard things you need to say.

10:16 And I love that because I always say about relationships, they're all about proper communication, not communication, but proper because we speak different languages no matter who we are as individuals sometimes so I think you have to have those conversations. And like so many people in relationships are like, oh, but I don't want to hurt their feelings. Eventually that's gonna happen. You're less likely to if you just bring it up and talk about it. Well. I once saw a couple's therapist and these interviews. I don't like being painted as this hero because I'm not, like I have all sorts of issues. I mean, I was in an office with my wife and couples counseling, which was great for us. It was a godsend for us, and the couples counselor told us, the couples that know how to fight always succeed. It's the couples that tell me we never fight that I worry about. And that's what it's about. You will inevitably you cannot live with somebody or be around them all the time and not hurt their feelings or annoy them in some way. That's a fantasy. So it's knowing how to have productive, healthy conflict love that's the key to success.

11:25 It's so true too, because that even goes right back to the turning the switch off bearing your That's what you're doing by not having ever a fight and then it explodes like twenty years later sometimes. So that's cool. So I think your band's gonna last a long time because you're not waiting twenty years to work on this crap. You're doing it right from the beginning. I mean, people ask us how we crank out an album every year, how we do everything that we do, And I think it's just because we found a healthy system and way to be consistent, yeah, and being in top and it's awesome. Also because we don't have a record label telling us what we can and can't release, and we see bands who get frustrated because they're like, oh man, we have this great record done, but it's been three years since we finished it. I would lose my mind, you know. So I think that the healthy culture also kind of bleeds into the system and the business operations. It's like we have an approach where if we needed to say, hey, we need a year off, We're burnt out, we need to regroup, we need to I don't think we would ever do that, because we're all workaholics, but in theory, if we wanted to set a boundary with ourselves, we could and there wouldn't be any pressure, unhealthy pressure behind us saying you have to keep going when you don't even want to.

12:38 And I love hearing that live because there's somebody recently that put an Instagram posting out the beginning of the year taking a mental health break, canceling stuff, and the hate that was in the social media comments just blew my fricking mind, Like you care that much about go and see the bad and once that you're willing to jeopardize their mental health or possibly life. Yeah. Man, And there's a lot of people out there. I was on Twitter the other day and I should know better or X or whatever it is now, and there was I won't say who it was, but there's this talking head who had a clip where he's like, men, real men don't take days off, days off or an excuse days off for this and all this stuff. And I was just like, I can't believe we're in twenty twenty four and those mentalities still exist in are prominent.

13:28 Like people are so afraid of being seen as weak that they're getting bullied into just being this pawn in a system where you know your hard work gets to benefit everybody else but yourself, and like a happy society like people. I know, America's built on the back of hard work, right, and we value that so much. I think sometimes we value that so much that we miss the importance of other things like time off and enjoyment. And like when you have a society where people can't afford vacations and people can't afford to take a break and they feel like they have to work two jobs, that's a society where you see violence spike and you see crime spike. Like, healthy societies have to have happy people, and happy people have to feel like they have things to look forward to.

14:10 Yeah, I was just. Thinking, at what desire do you have to live if there's nothing to look forward to it and you're gonna live groundhog day every day, usually the worst part of your day. So I agree with you a million percent. And then like when I go over Europe and see how they are, like you go into Spain and they have to close the afternoon down. Old me would be like, that's crazy. I want to be able to work. Why can't I work? Now that I've seen it, I'm like, man, they're a lot smarter than we are. I think we have a lot of problems. I think that are unique to America. And I'm not going to political direction here, so don't worry. But something that fascinates me is the spike and shootings. I have two little girls, and so it's crazy how anxious I feel thinking about them getting into public school and having to worry about that.

14:58 And again, like as much as both sides of the political aisle want to argue about the causes of that, I think what everyone can agree on is happy people don't get pushed to a point like that. Happy, healthy families don't breed situations like that. So self care as much as people will, you know, try to label that as laziness or a lack of effort to work, Like I manage people in residential treatment, working with people with disabilities for a long time, and I'll tell you the people who knew when to take a vacation and take days off and use their PTO, they were the best workers man like. When they were there, they were on and they crushed it. And it was the ones who always picked up the extra shifts and never took time off.

15:39 They were always just burned out in mediocre. You know, we're not built to go, go go and never rest. Yeah, it's just not how we're wired. No doubt. And then that is when you get burnt out, you don't want to do anything or worse so, and that's where I think music is therapy. So I'm glad you guys are here at lard in life. What else he got going on after today? We were just so we're going to be heading down for a West coast tour with Icon for Hire and hallow Seen. It's our headline tour. We're doing Texas and Phoenix and California. We're doing Pacific Northwest as well, do an Aftershock festival in Sacramento. I'll see you there. That's a great one too.

16:19 We're also excited that we just got confirmed for a mainstage slot at Sonic Temple next year, which we are insanely dude. We're just like, we won't beat our chest about much. We try to keep our heads down to be humble, but like, we have no political connection, we have no manager, we have no label. We played Columbus until we sold out a fifteen hundred cap room and that's why we're on that main stage. We just it's really rewarding to go somewhere into a new market and just to earn it, you know what I mean. So we're stoked for that. That is so freaking cool. And see that's the best part of the whole interview right there, because it just shows other bands out there at are new young what you can do and what you can accomplish because it's so hard nowadays and music and there you go. And that to me, that comes from being healthy too, I think hard say love it. Thanks for being here at Loward in Life and thanks for being on the Adventures bye man.

17:13 Thanks, I appreciate it. Thank you for listening to the Adventures of Tatemn on w for CUI Radio.