“Yeah, I believe it was written by Kris Kristofferson, who I’m also a big fan of. When we first got our record deal, the first thing we did with our money, we bought us a little house.
“We found a little house that had a basement, a place where we could set up our gear and just make as much noise as we wanted to without the neighbors hearing us. And we happened to be on a lake outside of Nashville – Old Hickory Lake.
And then we discovered that Johnny Cash was actually living on the same lake. I’m sure he was living far away in a much nicer area, but still, I could go out there and throw rocks on the lake and think, ‘Johnny Cash might be doing this at the very same time.’
“So that was a special thing to us, we felt like we had a connection in the music industry. We never actually got to meet Mr. Cash but that was a song that really resonated with me because I have been there, I have felt that the ‘Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down’ is a tough one and a rough one.
“But they’re thinking about it in somewhat of a more wholesome way, and they can smell someone frying chicken, and they can see a kid out kicking a can, which is a little different from the Sunday morning hangovers that I’ve woken up to.”
Elsewhere in the conversation, Caleb talked about Thin Lizzy and the band’s 1981 track “Renegade,” saying:
“Oh man, yeah. Thin Lizzy was probably one of our earliest memories as a band. That was the band that our cool uncles listen to all the time.
“So, family reunion, every year, they would play a Steve Miller Band song here, ZZ Top there, but when Thin Lizzy came on, it wasn’t like a one-song thing, they would play entire albums.
“And the first time we heard ‘Renegade,’ that was something that we were going to chase for our entire career. We’re still chasing it. We’ve tried to have versions of it in our music where we break everything down real low and then bring it right back up…
“But also, as a lyricist, I love how romanticized their vision of America is in the song. It’s about the Wild West, riding horses, and Bronco! They seem to paint a picture that even as an American, I’m going like, ‘God, that sounds like the coolest place ever! I want to go there!’
“And it’s just beautifully written, and that band means more to us than any other band, that’s the band that we were constantly chasing to be as cool as that. It might be too late, I think that train is already rolled out of the station.
“When we are in Dublin, we still go to their old hangouts, we try to sit there and have a few pints and feel their presence in the room.”
