Jamey Johnson on the Concussion That Stopped His Songwriting

When Jamey Johnson released his latest album, Midnight Gasoline, last year, it marked his first LP of new material in 14 years. Country fans were perplexed as to why Johnson, revered for his commitment to traditional country, had gone mostly dark in the studio during that time. In a new interview with Rolling Stone’s Nashville Now podcast, the Alabama native offers some insight: The dry spell mostly stemmed from a devastating fall and head injury that Johnson suffered outside the studio on Nashville’s Music Row a decade and a half ago.

“Everything was moving right along until about 2010,” Johnson tells Nashville Now. “It was a concussion I got slipping on some ice in the parking lot at the studio. That kind of turned everything upstairs into fight or flight. And it was stuck there for the longest time.”

Johnson says the concussion affected his ability to concentrate and even altered his personality that year, which dovetailed with the release of his 2010 double album, The Guitar Song.

“Everything in me was fight or flight… It felt like a lot of anger. A lot of frustration. I went from being able to process information at a pretty good pace to getting confused,” he says.

Johnson says he didn’t stop writing songs completely, but that his output was diminished. “I just didn’t write enough that would warrant an album,” he says, explaining that what songs he did come up with, he’d offer to friends. “I’d send [them] to Willie, or George Strait, or Merle.”

According to Johnson, who’s now sober from alcohol, he was also drinking heavily after the fall. “That’s right about the time I started [to get] blackout drunk. And it took me a while to heal up. Finally, in 2011, I quit drinking,” he says.

In hindsight, Johnson says the fall was more severe than he first believed. “That thing did a lot more damage than I thought it had done at the time,” he says. “Looking back, it’s so evident to me now, that’s the point where the rock hit the water — the asphalt hit my head.”

Watch Johnson’s full interview below.

Download and subscribe to Rolling Stone’s weekly country-music podcast, Nashville Now, hosted by senior music editor Joseph Hudak, on Apple Podcasts or Spotify (or wherever you get your podcasts). New episodes drop every Wednesday and feature interviews with artists and personalities like Lainey Wilson, Hardy, Charley Crockett, Gavin Adcock, Amanda Shires, Shooter Jennings, Margo Price, Halestorm, Dusty Slay, Lukas Nelson, Ashley Monroe, Old Crow Medicine Show’s Ketch Secor, and Clever.

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