Chat Pile wrote the nine-minute closing track of their debut album God’s Country in the same manner as usual: by getting stoned and jamming. Weed is a constant presence in the practice space and recording studio for the Oklahoma City band, fueling the marathon sessions of improvisation and refinement that yield their metallic noise rock. It doesn’t often make its way into the subject matter of their songs, which are filled with stories of violent dispossession and grim humor set in the fringes of American society. But this song, dubbed “grimace_smoking_weed.jpeg,” was different. “It was just a funny combination of words,” recalls guitarist Luther Manhole—who, like all of his bandmates, uses a pseudonym that makes him sound like a side character in The Toxic Avenger. “That was the challenge: writing an extremely serious song with that title.”
Atop squalls of guitar feedback and tom rolls, the song’s narrator, voiced by frontman Raygun Busch, carries out a tortured dialogue with the friendly purple McDonald’s mascot, who has evidently appeared as a hallucination in his bedroom. At times, it seems as though Grimace is an avatar of lost childhood innocence; at others, like a creature altogether more malevolent, mocking this poor guy’s pain and prodding him along toward self-destruction. Busch is utterly committed, howling and pleading with the monster he refers to as “purple man.” His performance, together with the band’s alternating slabs of noise and chasms of silence, is genuinely upsetting. Still, like witnessing Nicolas Cage in full meltdown mode, you have to admit it’s at least a little funny. The humor only makes the torment more real, grounding it, like all of Chat Pile’s songs, in a place where absurdity and agony are entwined.
This is perhaps not what comes to mind for most listeners when they think of typical weed music. The stereotypes may involve long guitar solos, lots of reverb, deep bass, low-slung rhythms, ear-tickling keyboards, a sense of hazy contentment with the world. But Chat Pile’s relentless bad vibes are evocative of another, no less common, side of being high: feeling trapped in your head, struggling to bat away anxious thoughts, and allowing yourself the occasional mordant joke. They demonstrate that music by and for stoners needn’t reflect old cliches. It isn’t some alternate headspace so much as an ordinary part of their lives, and a part of their music as well. “For me, weed and music go hand-in-hand,” says Busch. “All music is weed music.”
Damian Abraham, frontman of Canadian hardcore experimentalists Fucked Up, had been straight-edge for years when the onset of a panic attack while on tour in Amsterdam convinced him to try some local bud. He had a prescription for anxiety medication, but wasn’t taking it at the time. He was working on lyrics for Fucked Up’s third full-length, the sprawling prog-punk concept album David Comes to Life, and felt that the pills inhibited his writing.
“I feel shitty throwing medication under the bus, because I have people in my life who are able to function better because of this medication,” he says. “But, looking back, it’s like there was a lack of empathy. I remember trying to write lyrics on it, and they would always be weirdly detached when I went back to them. I had a friend who described cannabis as an empathy drug, that it allowed them to feel more emotionally in link with the world. I feel the same way.”
A decade and change later, Abraham now smokes and dabs regularly. For him, the aid that cannabis gives him in relaxing and singing expressively outweighs any damage the smoke may do to his vocal chords. Like several of the other artists interviewed for this piece, he believes that getting high allows him access to a more intuitive manner of putting songs together: more to do with instinct than conscious thought, and with less inhibition to try ideas that might seem far-fetched if he were sober. He offers Fucked Up’s 2021 album Year of the Horse, a rock opera in four movements, as an example: “I was trying different vocal sounds that I wouldn’t want to put on a track otherwise. You can experiment and find cool new ways of doing things, which your over-analytical mind would root out as silly, or too much against what you’re supposed to be doing.”
Multi-instrumentalist Nate Amos of Water From Your Eyes, also sees weed as a tool for working intuitively rather than analytically. Now in his early 30s, he began using weed in his early teenage years, and has been a daily smoker for much of his life. “The important thing to remember is that this is weed music,” he said of Structure, the Brooklyn art-pop duo’s 2021 breakout album. “There was not a single drop of work done in the recording, editing, or mixing process that was not preceded by a spliff.”
“Barley,” the lead single from Water From Your Eyes’ new album Everyone’s Crushed, is built with a seemingly divergent array of sounds: a breakbeat that nods in the direction of drum’n’bass, an arpeggio that hits like a slot machine announcing a winner, a fragment of rock’n’roll lead guitar. It definitely sounds like weed—not because of any individual texture, but because of the oblique logic that informs the relationship of each element to all the others. There’s a sense of following impulses that might seem outlandish to the THC-free mind. It would be difficult to articulate the reason it’s so satisfying when, for instance, a particular detuned synth riff begins to ooze like neon slime atop the rest of the music. The important thing is that it works, not why it works.
“There was some process that would just begin to happen automatically,” Amos says. “Writing and working with weed, I always found that there was a point where it would help me get into this headspace where I wasn’t even thinking about the fact that I was making music, like how you don’t think about the fact that you’re talking when you’re talking.”
For rapper, singer, and electronic musician dreamcastmoe, weed’s therapeutic effects are an important part of the artistic process. His upcoming release, a compilation of remixes from a previous album, is called Sound Is Like Water, 202% THC Remix Package, and features a massive sparkly nug in an outstretched palm on the cover. “Weed for me is a means for comfort and peace, to ease the stress of everyday life,” he says. “It’s all about the process for me. Sitting and rolling is my way of clearing my head and making space for what’s to come in my creative process. The process of rolling up is equally satisfying to actually smoking.”
Margo Price views pot similarly. The country-rock singer-songwriter often uses it while on tour, as a way to come down from the adrenaline of a performance and get enough rest to do it again the following day. She also credits it with helping her to quit drinking alcohol, a substance that she says closed at least as many creative doors as it opened for her. “I don’t think that you can truly write something when you’re really angry or really in the throes of some big feelings,” she says. “It always takes some coming down and reflection to get there. I’ve experimented with writing on all sorts of substances. You look back on something that you wrote when you were drunk, and you usually go, ‘hmmm.’ There’s a disconnect there.”
Price, who has collaborated with Willie Nelson—and smoked weed with him, naturally—points out that pot is still illegal in Tennessee, where she lives, and that she still gets comments from people who are bothered by her use of it. She credits Nelson’s advocacy for destigmatizing weed among country musicians and listeners, and feels that it’s important for artists like her who have seen its benefits to continue speaking up. (In 2019, she launched her own signature strain in collaboration with Willie’s Reserve, the cannabis company Nelson owns.) “For so long, it’s been demonized, and alcohol has been given this pass as the everyman’s drug,” she says. “My life was never destroyed by weed. It really has saved my life too, talking about the depression and the anxiety that I’ve faced.”
Price and her collaborators indulged heartily in cannabis and psilocybin both during the creation of Strays, released earlier this year. “I love to get stoned or take a microdose, set a timer for 15 minutes, and just write free word association,” she says. “It’s about being relaxed enough to realize that you’re more of a conduit than you are creating things out of your own mind.” She remembers waking up one morning after a particularly deep mushroom trip, taking a “hippie speedball” (that is, a bit of weed with your morning coffee), and writing three songs with her husband Jeremy Ivey in a single day. One of those songs, “Been to the Mountain,” opens with a bit of recognizably psychedelic music—swirls of organ and ceremonial-sounding bells—before shifting gears into strutting ’70s-style guitar rock. “Well, I wish I was God, but I’m glad that I’m not,” Price sings, “’Cause I think too much, got my head in a knot.” Writing it, she says, “was like a hash dream.”
Weed’s ability to expand one’s outlook also aided Price when it came time to record overdubs for Strays. Along with co-producer Jonathan Wilson, she would smoke joints dipped in resin and covered in kief, then head into the studio to sort out additional instrumentation to help make each song sparkle. Overdubs are an ideal part of the recording process for getting high, Price says, because they give you room to experiment without worrying about whether a left-field idea might derail the basic tracks: “You can always take it out later.”
That’s one issue with using weed as a creative tool: Sometimes, it opens a pathway to unexpected profundity; others, it can make banal ideas seem interesting, for as long as you’re under its spell. When I ask Chat Pile whether they’ve ever returned to something that sounded great high, only to find that it doesn’t hit the same way sober, they laugh with recognition. “As the least stoned member of the band, I can say it does help, every once in a while, to take off the helmet of weed and listen to things with your head,” says Stin, Chat Pile’s bassist. Busch chimes in: “You gotta have talent before you smoke weed. Not that I’m the most talented person. But weed is not the answer to talent.”
Amos of Water From Your Eyes quit smoking weed in mid-2022, after the completion of Everyone’s Crushed, as part of a yearlong break from mind-altering substances. Working over the last year on his solo songwriting project This Is Lorelei, he says, was effectively the first time in his life he’d made music without weed. “It feels like a more intentional process, and not necessarily in a way that’s purely good,” he says. Without the sort of flow state that getting high can help to induce, “it’s hard to escape from thinking about what you’re doing in a very literal way.”
Fucked Up’s Abraham sometimes takes breaks from smoking while working, including when his kids come to visit him at the studio. Like Amos, he finds that writing sober is more intentional and analytical, while writing high is more freely expressive, and that the two perspectives can complement each other. “I go back and forth,” he says, “but it’s never one way or the other, where I’m like, ‘This is the way I want to do it from now on.’”
Without a deliberate pause like Amos or Abraham’s, there may not even be a control variable to measure against. I asked Busch how Chat Pile’s songs might turn out differently if he and his bandmates didn’t smoke weed while making them. He laughed before answering: “We’ll never know.”
It’s difficult to assess the creative impact of weed on artists at a time when it’s no more exotic or difficult to obtain than beer in many places. Bob Dylan famously introduced the Beatles to pot, soon after which they ditched their wholesome image and made Rubber Soul. It is hard to imagine, in 2023, the idea that a few tokes could bring about revolutionary change in anyone’s artistic output any more than a strong IPA could. For the artists interviewed in this piece, getting high is something that happens all the time, a regular part of their experience of the world. But each one pointed to the idea that weed helps them get past their own entrenched perceptions, doubt, and unease. “Cannabis does allow us to get free of ourselves, in a way,” says Abraham. “It allows us to disassociate from the bullshit.”
