BJ Barham Discusses 10 Years Of Moving Forward On “Standing Still” Tour

BJ Barham: Ten is a number that has come up a lot this year. Ten years of sobriety, tenth record, ten years of marriage; it’s a big ten year, which is weird.

We noticed there’s ten songs on the new record. Ten has been circling all year.

BJ: And it’s a big round number because, you know, I’m 40. And I got sober when I was 30. I got married when I was 30.

You know, it’s fun, ten years later – tenth anniversary of sobriety, tenth anniversary with my wife, tenth record, tenth studio album with the band. So it’s kind of neat to see that number coming up.

BJ: Yeah, life-work balance, I’m in a really great spot with that.

BJ: I think we got 71 shows this year. And, like, before this band [lineup] joined, our lowest show count for a year was like, 250.

It’s about finding that balance. If I’m gone 70 days a year, that means 290 days a year I’m home being the dad. I’m home being the husband. Like, it’s a much better place.

BJ: It’s one of those things where you pay your dues. I’m proud. I almost wear the 71 shows [for 2024], just as much of a badge of honor as I did 300 shows in a prior year.

Because any young band can go out there and play 300 menu venues a year. The real thing is being able to play 70 shows a year and still take care of my guys and have a crew. Everybody’s paid. Everybody makes enough in those 70 shows to where they get to be the partner or the dad, or whatever they wanna do with those other 290 days.

BJ: It’s very obvious massive life events happened, you know, other than the entire band quitting. That was big with the exodus of the last band lineup. Everybody quit on the same day. My management quit on the same day. That was right after finishing the last night of Roadtrip to Raleigh in 2017.

Everybody quit the band. So I’m coming out of Roadtrip, a year after Wolves and feeling great. And then all of a sudden, the brake lines get cut.

And luckily, I was able to bounce back pretty… Ah, bounce back, that’s an understatement of the year. I was able to find a really, really great band. And this current version of the band, the newest member, Alden has been here six years, so it’s like, I feel really, really good about this.

You know, my entire career, up until these guys, the number one thing I talked about in interviews was the tumultuous turnover rate.

When you’ve had 30 members in this band in twelve years, you ask yourself: what are you doing? What’s wrong with you?

BJ: There’s a lot of touring, burning people out. And I wasn’t sober, I wasn’t a husband, I wasn’t a dad, I was just kind of an asshole lead singer, that was an addict. I would get drunk and I’d run off with the mouth, and I’d hurt people’s feelings.

And, you know, it’s hard to work for someone who doesn’t respect you. I respected them during the day, but at night I’d get drunk, and i would say something just completely rude or mean. Eventually, that takes its toll to where even if you get sober for a couple of years it doesn’t make up for all the years where you treated people shitty. I could never have admitted that pre-sobriety and I could never admit I was the problem pre-sobriety.

The clarity from sobriety allows you to look in the mirror and say, you see the broken pieces.

And instead of trying to make excuses or try to cover it up with booze or drugs, it’s seeing that broken thing and accepting that broken thing and trying to fix the broken thing and trying to be a better version of the broken thing.

And that’s where having a kid helped. You know, there’s a very clear line in my songwriting once I found out I was becoming a father, that would have been when I made Things Change.

When we started Things Change we recorded that in November 2017. Pearl was born in April of 2018. So when I’m in the studio making that record, I know that I’m getting ready to become a dad. I know that my life is drastically gonna change.

You could hear it on songs like, “Things Change” and then “The World Is On Fire” where that was the first time when I made a reference that I’m gonna be a dad.

BJ: That’s still a fun song. I hate that “The World Is On Fire” is still relevant today. I hate that it’s still relevant eight years later. It’s still just as relevant as it was when I wrote it.

But it’s fun every night getting to say this is where it changed, guys. And then it gets to that third verse where I’m fighting for something.

There’s somebody I’m fighting for now. And that’s pretty neat to have that clear timeline of when did his songwriting change with the new band, new record and a new outlook on life.

BJ: Well, it’s a heavy song to play, so I don’t play it a lot.

BJ: We don’t do it a lot. The band doesn’t do it a lot just because it’s a really heavy tune.

I had five or six people send personal requests for that song. That why the song got added. It’s like, “If you can, I’d like to hear this. We went through this,” and “We’ve never heard this song live. Can you play it?”

BJ: We always play in the first year either “One Day At A Time” or “When We Were Younger Men”

But it was fun to be able to play it, like a really stripped-down version, like the way I wrote it. Like a really vulnerable version of the song.

BU: I’m a folk singer that gets to dress up as a front man every now and then. That’s the fun part.

BJ: That’s a good thing, and I had to learn that lesson. When people leave the band, sometimes it’s not a personal thing.

Sometimes it’s that season has changed in their life, and it’s their time to go. It doesn’t mean they hate me. It doesn’t mean they don’t want to be my friend anymore. It just means that, like they don’t want a tour as much, or there’s…

BJ: Yes, …a path change. I always equate it to no matter if you plant a tree, everybody starts off as the trunk. But as time goes by, those branches grow apart from each other. And eventually you look up ten years into a band, you’re not even close to being at the same spot where you started together.

And so luckily, I’ve been able to salvage a lot of those old friendships like Bill [Corbin] and Whit [Wright] and Colin [DiMeo]. A couple of those guys like Kevin and Ryan, I really won’t ever be able to. They don’t want to.

I’m thankful for people like Bill. We went five years without even speaking to each other. And Bill was probably my best friend in the band.

Bill had been in the band almost ten years. And we went almost five years without even speaking to each other. And then when we did speak to each other, it was like picking right up, like somebody hit pause, and we didn’t focus on any of the bad.

BJ: We just needed the breathing space. Needed time to get an identity away from each other.

Bill needed to have an identity that wasn’t American Aquarium.

BJ: All muscle. All protein. it’s great because our friendship, I like to think our friendship is just as strong now as it was at its height.

BJ: Literally strong. Bill jumped in with the band last year. When Alden had a kind of a medical emergency, Bill filled in for two shows.

And it was so much fun because getting back on stage with him was special, and you could see he was smiling, and I was smiling.

Toward the end of that version of the band, there was nobody smiling on stage. We were a really good band back then, but we were miserable. Nobody wanted to be doing it. Nobody wanted to be on stage together.

And it was just a really toxic place. Hard to make ends meet. We were barely getting by. Right now, it’s like, you see the change, like everybody on stage tonight smiles and has a good time. Their cell phone bills are paid and their mortgages are paid.

BJ: It’s nice now, because the boys are all at a spot where they…

BJ:  A hundred percent. It’s all foundational. Those guys laid the brick work to build the house on.  Those guys put in the backbreaking labor of sleeping on the floors and driving 12 hours a day in a packed van to do the leg work so that now we get on a bus every night. It is embarrassingly comfortable traveling, and we’ve been on the [tour] bus since 2018.

BJ: It’s a tiered thing. Those guys put in so much work [through the Wolves tour] that these guys could, like, really thrive now. Because those guys’ backbreaking touring has led to us being able to play 70 shows a year in a bus, flying from place to place, wherever we need to.

BJ: It is. I’m very thankful and that’s what I’ve told those guys. I’ve told the ones that still talk to me how thankful I am that they put in that work.

It is not lost on me that I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for those ten years because it’s easy to turn 200 fans into 400 fans.

They did the hard part, turning two into four, four into eight, eight to 16, 16 to 32, you know.

So every year you’re trying to double. The rough climb.

And once you get the airplane off the fucking ground, it’s easy to fly. All you gotta do is not crash it. The hard parts is understanding flight and getting the damn thing off the ground.

BJ: Sobriety is really helping. The clarity that comes with sobriety to… any time we have any problems, we communicate very well.

We don’t let things fester. If somebody has something to say, we say it, we fix it, then we move on. Because we all want this to last. We all want this to be our gig. Like, I love those guys, and they wouldn’t be here if they didn’t wanna be here.

That’s a neat feeling to have a band that wants to be here.

It’s a neat feeling to have a band, like, when you call them up and you’re like, “Hey, can we?” And they’re like, “Of course we can. Let’s go do it.”

I’m in a really great place. I will tell people, I’m the luckiest guy in the world. Like, no complaints from me. I’m at a point in my career, where I still get to have a career. But it’s not eating away my personal life.

There’s this really beautiful balance. And every year is trying to figure out putting a little bit more weight on one side and seeing if we can make it perfect.

So it’s been a lot of fun.

BJ: No. We start announcing our first opening act on Monday.

It’s booked. it’s always fun to see some of the really far-fetched things that people are guessing when the announcements start, like the things that could never happen, and then seeing some people are on the right track. Some people have a good idea, like, they’re clawing up the right tree, you know?

BJ: Holly (our manager) talks to a lot of people.

BJ: Yeah, for sure. We’ll announce on Monday, and then other openers will be mentioned on other Mondays.