You Have a Higher Calling, Yield to It | John Rich

You started by talking about the fact that when you wrote the majority of the 2000 songs that you wrote, you did have commercial top 40 success in mind and were often commissioned specifically to do that. We talked about the fact that there can be real artistry involved in that now, but then it sounds like the additional necessity to tow the party line, let's say, started to put constraints on your creative ability but also on your conscience that began to plague you.

You said that one of the things that plagued you about that in particular was your sense that you were giving the wrong message to your boys, and they were pretty young when you started thinking about that. So let me ask you two questions about that. The first is: what risks do you see? The reason that it bothers me so much to see creative people become ideologically possessed is that the only thing that creative people have is the genuine creativity of their production, right? And that's really the goose that lays the golden eggs, and that's rather a fragile beast.

I mean, first of all, most people don't have it. High-level creativity is a relatively rare trait, and then it's easily crushed. It only flourishes under some conditions, and one of the conditions it flourishes under, by all appearances, is something like freedom. Right now, you can maybe put a couple of constraints on it, as we discussed with regards to your commercial aim, but if you keep piling on the impossibilities or the arbitrary restrictions, then you risk doing yourself damage.

So, two questions there: like what did you notice, if anything, happening to your ability to write creatively under those constraints? And also, like how did you become aware, for example, that you weren't setting a good example for your boys? How did you discover that or come to realize that?

So, under those constraints, your songwriting at that point is completely superficial. It's only to make a check, it's only to make a dollar, it's only to get a plaque, it's only to further yourself, which is highly superficial to me. So when you start talking about my two sons, well man, that's as deep as you're going to get. I mean, there's nothing more important than that to me.

When I saw that the example I was setting, and that they were going to be following, was superficial in nature, that, “Wow, Dad's—we know Dad; Dad's a Real McCoy! But Dad's willing to go superficial if it means he keeps getting that money and getting those plaques,” that is no way to live. I'd rather you be completely broke in your life, poor as a church mouse, but have your constitution about you and have integrity about you and be a real McCoy, as we would call them in the country. I'd much rather my boys be that. I don't care about what they do when it comes to financial stuff.

So, turning that corner and getting away from those shackles of what the industry was limiting me to, turned me loose. I mean, it turned me loose! For a minute, it's almost like, “Wait, you mean I can actually step over here, and nobody's going to pop me?” Okay, and so I step over there. Well, can I take another step? Yep, and nobody popped me! As far as the industry, nobody popped me. Now the press and other people, they come at me all the time, but the way I look at people attacking what I have to say is, it's validation that I hit the mark. It's validation that I said it correctly.

You know, if everybody likes what you have to say, you're not saying it correctly. That’s the way I've always thought, and that’s the way I feel today. So, it loosened me up, doctor, in such a way that I could be more of just a wide-open instrument for whatever comes in that I think's important. That's been laid on me that’s important, then I can make that happen. There's no guarantee it's going to be a quote success, but I can make it a reality.

That's all you can really ask for. I think about the Declaration of Independence when it says we have the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It doesn't say we have the right to be happy or the right to be successful, the right to be rich, or any of these other things. It says you have the right to pursue happiness—to go after it. The word "pursuit" in itself means in motion. That means happiness is a moving target. I'm sure you would tell me, “What’s happiness to you in your twenties, thirties, forties, fifties?” Well, it does change as your life changes.

So those are the principles that I look at. At the end of the day, I know who gave me the ability to do it in the first place. You know, I yielded to Him a long time ago. If you're yielded to Him, to the Lord, and He knows that you're willing to run through a door that He opens for you, He'll give you stuff; He'll send you things, and revelation is one of those things.

Okay, so a couple of questions about that. The first one is, I guess I have three questions really. What gave you the sense that you were leading your boys astray? I mean, they were very young, and the sorts of things that you're talking about are relatively subtle. So was it guilt on your part, or was it something that you think they could actually see? Or was it something that you were afraid they were going to be able to see? I’m not clear about the actual details about what was plaguing your conscience.

Now, I can understand that you were increasingly uncomfortable with the constraints on your free speech, and obviously that's at least in part because those constraints pose a danger to your creative ability. But I still don't quite exactly understand how it was that you became convinced that you were setting the wrong model, let's say, for your sons. What do you think it was that they were seeing? Was it reflected in the way you were talking to them or in a bitterness? What was going on?

Yeah, well, I think we've all found ourselves watching the evening news and going, “Can you believe these people? Can you believe what's going on in our country right now?” Or, you know, they'd overhear me talking to my wife about, “Can you believe what this record label is doing?” Or, “I just got in trouble for doing an interview with this guy,” and they're hearing these things.

But then I'll gear back up and walk right back out there and go play ball with the exact same people that I've been yelling at at the house. That's called being a hypocrite. That is the essence of being a hypocrite, which is probably the worst thing you could be. I mean, even in the Bible, it says I'd rather you be hot or be cold, but if you're lukewarm, I'll spit you out of my mouth. That was from the Son of God Himself said that, so you do not want to be lukewarm. If you're going to be a bad guy, be a real bad guy. If you're going to be a good guy, be a really good guy. Don't be in the middle.

There's a lot of fence riders, and so I felt like just looking at myself, I'm trying to ride the fence here with this deal, and I’m commanded to not do that. Knowing my boys were on the edge of really starting to maybe put those things together bothered me, but what bothered me at that moment was knowing I was bothered by it. I realized that's who I had become, and that that's the game I was playing, and I'm not really much of a game player, as you can probably tell.

So I said, “Yeah, I think I'm going to exit this game now.” I know that means I got to let go of what I've been doing for 25 years at a high level in this town, and I don't know what I'm going to be able to grab onto when I let go of this one. I'm in freefall for a while, but hey, you got it! So, make something—make something be there that I can grab onto. And He certainly did!

So, that’s really how it played out. I was bothered by it; it was bothering my conscience, and my spirit was upset by it. If you can't sleep well at night because you know you're being a hypocrite, you better fix that.

Yeah, well, you see, that’s a very interesting observation because I've just written a new book called "We Who Wrestle with God," and it comes out November 12th. It's a journey through the characterizations of God in 10 Old Testament stories. There's some forays into New Testament material, but I'm saving most of that for another book, and God is characterized in these stories, at least in part, in two ways. One is as the spirit of what calls to you, so grabs your interest, compels you forward, fills you with enthusiasm, makes you want to move towards a goal, makes you want to hit the target properly.

The other characterization is the constraints of conscience. You know, I think about this biologically and instinctively, too, because I think the thing that those things dovetail. It looks to me like conscience, the voice of conscience, is something like the voice of the longest possible term game. You could imagine that in your situation there's two forces that are striving inside of you, and one is the forces that say maintain your relationship with what's essentially high-level commercial success that comes at the price of pleasing the marketplace and also not displeasing the people who control your access to that.

That's not nothing, as you pointed out, but then your conscience comes up and it's saying something like, “Yeah, but you might be giving up something more important here,” and you don’t want to do that because that’s a bad long-term game. Bad for you, bad for your kids, bad for society—it's a bad social game too. If you play the longer-term game, you might pay a short-term price, right? That's the price you pay for speaking your mind when there's a certain amount of pressure against doing so, but it's an unbeatable long-term game in my estimation if your conscience is clean.