NEWS
22 February 2022
Newsdesk
Oliver Tree joins Zane Lowe in the studio on Apple Music 1 for a wide-ranging conversation touching on his decision to come out of retirement to release his new country album ‘Cowboy Tears’, overcoming addiction, why he feels he sacrificed his youth for his art, wanting to make feature films and more.
Oliver Tree Tells Apple Music About Deliberate Self Sabotage & Not Wanting To Make Anymore Albums…
Everything I've done is a failure. That was the one that was the least of the biggest. I don't want to have success. I'm trying to set this up so that I don't have to do anymore albums. You have to understand why I picked country. None of my fans are going to buy that s***. It's going to flop. And then Atlantic will release me and I can make feature films, which is why I've literally been doing everything in my power, fighting every single host that I can talk with so that I don't get invited back on their TV shows. I've been literally doing whatever I can so that I don't have another album that I have to make.
Oliver Tree Tells Apple Music He "Traded" His Youth To Be An Artist & Didn't Date...
Being an artist is a sacrifice. And I've already given up my life for making art. So why would that stop now? Everything man. I just traded my whole youth for being an artist. I didn't even go on dates for five years. I literally just worked, worked, worked, worked, worked and masturbat*d. So I could be focused. I'm being serious. I literally just traded the best years of our life. Threw it out the window. So I could make 40 albums that would never see daylight.
Oliver Tree Tells Apple Music His New Album Touches on Addiction, Heartbreak & His Relationship With Money..
So what I found was working on myself, working on my soul, healing myself, I got sober during the course of making this album. Not drinking. I've been a drug addict since I was 15, basically. Something I've struggled with for most of my adult life. I mean, if all of it, I don't know when you'd become an adult, but I was basically an adult when I was a kid, if that makes any sense. Long story short, this album covers a wide range of topics, everything from addiction to heartbreak, to finance. For me, money is not a big thing. I talk about it, but really as long as I can afford to make art and that's why I partnered with Atlantic was so that I could make great art. I've mentioned this in the past, but I took way less on my advances so I could have bigger video budgets. I said, "I'll take half as much, but I want to put that money into my marketing budgets," which is just your music video budgets because that's pretty much the only way you market music nowadays.
Oliver Tree Tells Apple Music Listening To His Album Made Him Cry...
I listened to it yesterday because I had to approve the lyrics, I cried... the whole time. Once I started crying, I didn't stop.
Oliver Tree Tells Apple Music About Hitting Rock Bottom…
It becomes a thing where you're starting with one thing and then you're doing seven drugs at once. You know what I mean? And taking a little bit of this, a little bit of that and it becomes spiralling to the point where my parents kicked me out in high school. They're like, you're no longer welcome to live here. I was selling drugs to survive and living at my friend's house, sleeping on their couches. And it was very close to me being, I could have gone down that path and I did go down it to a certain extent, but I hit rock bottom. I did this family trip to Burning Man and I … ate way too much LSD and I ended up long story short, having my own rebirth and going to my funeral, seeing my whole death play out. And, that was my rock bottom as a drug addict.
Oliver Tree Tells Apple Music About Becoming Sober…
I only just got fully sober. Basically I got off weed a year ago. I got off alcohol, I would say eight months ago or something. And then I quit vaping a month ago by doing mushrooms. Micro-dosing. And for those who don't know, this is a very powerful tool for addiction. When you have those urges, you just take a little bit more, but just kind of having micro-dosing throughout the day for about a week and it's so powerful and I'm around everyone whos constantly smoking and all these things and to get off of that was a big deal. And it's very hard to do, but through just using proper dosing on micro-dosing mushrooms is very powerful.
Oliver Tree Tells Apple Music About Travelling The World…
The goal was to hit all seven continents before I turned 30, which is still the goal. But then I was, why not do it before I'm 20? Why stop there? And yeah, I'm always just touring and I don't get to really see that much. So after COVID and after I left my grandparents' ranch. I made an effort to say, "Hey, I'm going to start just only going to places that I've never been." So I lived in Russia for four months.
Oliver Tree Tells Apple Music About His Musical Upbringing and His Parents Prioritising Art…
My house I grew up in was very musical. So I didn't learn any other languages. Music was the language that was taught in my house. Making art was... But the truth is, my parents, instead of buying new cars, they made an agreement, we would buy art for the house and instruments instead of having a new vehicle or something like that. They'd prioritise art as the number one priority.
Oliver Tree Tells Apple Music About Writing The Album On His Grandmother’s Ranch…
I wrote over a hundred songs for this album. At my grandmother's ranch, I wrote for the first six months. Yeah. The truth is I grew up going to my grandmother's ranch every single year, grandma and grandpa, my grandfather has passed away. So he is no longer, but he had a guitar there and acoustic. And when I was there, I was during the pandemic for six months, I was basically just trying to get away from it all. This is after I had just retired. So I was completely out of the music biz and I was just spending time getting back in touch with myself. No more tours. Everything's cancelled. I had spent the last five years before that traveling the world. So this was the first time I had some downtime. And so I was like, okay, let me try to figure things out.
