Billy Gardell

And so I knew that, okay, you've had this success and you've been blessed, but now if you don't get healthy, you're not going to be around to guide your son and annoy your wife.

They've been my two favorite things.

My favorite person to annoy is my favorite person.

Once they stamp you into what you are, like you're the overweight guy, the blue collar guy, or whatever that is...

They see that you've made money off that, so they want you to continue to be that thing.

That's just math.

But you also have to be brave enough to, whether it's a health change or the kind of roles you take or the kind of art you do, whatever you want to present, if you want to go to that next thing, there's always going to be a period of transition where you just have to trust that your talent is going to push you through to the next thing.

The other example I could give was in the club settings back in the day, there was the MC who did 10 minutes and made the announcements.

They were usually a local act.

Then there was a feature act who would do 25 to 30 minutes, and then you hopefully transitioned up into being a headliner, and you would close the show.

Well, in the days where I was transferring from feature act to headliner, my manager at the time said,

know we're going to tell all these clubs you're only coming back if you headline half of them are going to say yes the other half of them are going to say no you've got to figure out what to do for the weeks that you're off because if we go back on one all of them will go back so we have to be able to say no so i jumped on a paint truck and was painting houses half the time and headlining half the time until i could get my calendar full of headlining dates so

It's kind of that same thing where you go, yeah, okay, it's going to take a few people to go, no, wow, he looks different.

We don't know what we can do.

Until you see that one person that goes, you know what, I want to try him in this because I think it would be a different look for him.

And then you gravitate to that and you hopefully move forward as an artist.

No, I went back to the clubs for the first year and a half.

Yeah, tell me about that.

I went back to the clubs.

And that started even before that.