When Jay Buchanan, the full-throated frontman of rock band Rival Sons, set out to make his first solo album, Weapons of Beauty, he knew he needed privacy to write. Buchanan took that idea to the extreme, however, and went into full isolation for three months in California’s Mojave Desert.
“I spend so much time away from home that I find myself incapable of ignoring my family in order to create. I’m not one of those people that can disassociate to write when the kids are on the other side of the door,” he tells Rolling Stone’s Nashville Now podcast. “In order to tune in, I have to be able to tune out, completely.”
As it happened, Buchanan’s childhood friend, an exotic reptile breeder who spends his days in the desert mating reticulated pythons and the like, had the perfect place: an underground bunker. Buchanan was filming his role in the Bruce Springsteen biopic Deliver Me From Nowhere at the time (he plays the singer of the Stone Pony house band, alongside members of Greta Van Fleet), and when production wrapped, he flew home to California, loaded his van with provisions, and left for the Mojave.
The bunker, accessible only by walking down a long tunnel, didn’t have cell service, running water, or electricity. Or even a lock on its door. During Covid, someone broke in and the door jamb was never repaired. Buchanan took precautions.
“I spent those three months down in this hole in the desert unable to lock the door at night,” he says. “So, I’d put water bottles in front of it, and my pistol under my pillow. It was trippy.”
The result of the experiment yielded intense songs like “True Black” and “Deep Swimming,” which he went on to record later with producer Dave Cobb in Savannah, Georgia. Says Buchanan, “I didn’t set out for it to sound that crazy.”
This episode of Nashville Now was filmed live at Vinyl Tap, a record store and bar in East Nashville. Watch the full show 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, Kings of Leon, Breland, Bryan Andrews, Gavin Adcock, Amanda Shires, Shooter Jennings, Margo Price, Ink, Halestorm, Dusty Slay, Lukas Nelson, Ashley Monroe, Old Crow Medicine Show’s Ketch Secor, Clever, and journalists Marissa R. Moss and Josh Crutchmer.
