Rick Rubin is an angel sent from God. He provided this really safe masculine space where I could fall into the weirdest, darkest, and most vulnerable parts of myself that I didn’t even know existed. The whole experience felt like an acid trip, and I’ve never done acid. While I was writing this record, it was during the COVID era and we were watching people go through so much pain in the world. Then in my personal life, we’re going on year seven and eight of my own litigation. It felt almost like when you’re swimming underwater and you’re not sure if you’re going to make it to the surface. That’s where I was emotionally. I was testing my limits of what a human has the capacity to deal with. And in that terror, I had a really beautiful, spiritual experience where I quite literally talked to my higher power. I’m well aware of how insane that sounds. I was so afraid to be honest about that to anyone, let alone tell the world this.
So the morning after I had this insane spiritual experience, I wrote “Eat the Acid” on Zoom with my mom and one of my longtime collaborators, Stuart Crichton. It felt like I had discovered the next dimension. All of my songs are my babies, but this one is one of the most special pieces of music I’ve ever made. My mom told me to never take acid because she saw everything. The night I had my spiritual experience, I felt like I met God and saw everything. Once you see something, you can’t unsee it. So it forces you into a reincarnation of yourself and your perspective, and that’s uncomfortable. That growth can be really terrifying to see the world in a different way. So as the world was going through that with the pandemic, I was going through that internally.
Sometimes when you listen to a song too many times, you get sick of it. This is a song I never got sick of. It was this beautiful reminder of the fact that I believe there’s something or someone with me and to never give up hope and that there’s maybe a meaning behind all the madness. That’s really why I wanted to put this song out as the lead single, and I’m just so proud of it.
My fans always go on the ride with me and that’s why I fucking love my animals. They never know what they’re going to get and they’re always here for it. I believe that when creating art, I’m not a product. So if I’m an artist, I have to allow space for all of those incarnations of me to exist. They knew what I was going through. It wasn’t an easy time for very many of us.
