- Hi AD, come on it.
This is my home.
[upbeat music]
So come on in, I'll show you around.
I'm gonna take you into the den first.
This is where we spend most of our time.
[footsteps thudding]
And this our dog by the way.
This is Jules and you'll see her running around,
she's a little bit skittish.
Anyway, this is where we hang out
and one of the reasons the room is set up like this,
I don't like things to be geared around a television set,
but the way that the room was set up,
it already had a fireplace over here and a TV over here,
so I put two kind of french country
couches facing each other.
It's very much kind of a family setting in here.
We play a lot of games at this table.
So this is really, when I say it's a living room,
like we really live in here.
If you wanna go back this way
I'll show you where the kitchen is and it works out great
because the kitchen basically flows
right into the family room.
[upbeat music]
One of the things I loved about this house
is it already had these giant doors
that remind me sort of like barn doors
which ties into the barn
that you guys are gonna see pretty soon.
This is the kitchen.
Very open, very sunny in here and this is where we eat
every night at six o'clock.
We eat our breakfast in here.
Actually the kids eat here at breakfast and I fix food,
send it across.
And I love a giant island.
It's just, you know, it's very homey.
Whenever we entertain, whenever we have family here,
it seems like we never leave the kitchen.
All right, so we're gonna go into the dining room
but of course before we do that,
you have to see, this is the art gallery.
Very expensive art right here,
don't wanna miss that.
[upbeat music]
This is the formal dining room.
I have the luxury of spending a lot of time on a tour bus
and going to places that have interesting antique shops
and then being able to throw them onto our truck,
which it holds all of our gear.
So I've gotten a lot of the things actually in this room
from Texas, from Houston.
I bought this old mirror.
I bought this old, I think they call it an upholstery table.
Just you know, lot's of little weird things
in here and you know, it kinda creates a vibe
and lots of conversation.
Now we're gonna walk over into the more formal living room.
[upbeat music]
We don't spend as much time in here but if you see
over here, there's a lot of sort of religious pieces
and I love that because it just,
it gives sort of a romantic vibe.
I bought actually a couch.
This is the newest thing in the whole house
was a West Elm couch, but I love the way it just feels
against all the old antiques.
So let's go in here and check out the music room.
[upbeat music]
It is obviously mostly taken up by a grand piano.
I do have some guitars in here
and we do hang out in here quite a bit.
My kids do play.
One of the things I don't really love is real taxidermy,
but I am not above putting a paper mache
elephant over the fireplace.
All right, I'm gonna take you one more place.
We're gonna go to our outside den.
[upbeat music]
And this had been such a great second family room.
We build fires out here,
the kids even roast marshmallows out here,
and when it does get cool,
if that ever happens in Nashville, Tennessee
since it's 100 degrees here almost all the time,
it's just a super great place to hang out.
So we're leaving the family room now
and we're gonna go outside and like I said,
with two little boys, my objective has always
been to sort of keep them from in front of screens
and more facing outside in nature.
[gentle music]
We have a fire pit out here,
we have a big family table,
and we have a carpet ball game,
and we have a tree house back over there,
which is really beautiful.
So everything is pretty much gravitated
to living life outside in nature.
All right, so you guys have seen where we live,
but I'm gonna take you down to the barn
and show you where we ride horses
and also where mom works.
All right so quick back story.
I used to live out in the country before I had my kids
and we used to have horses
and longhorn cows out there and chickens.
Once my boys came along,
we decided we gotta get closer into the city
so we just packed up everything
like "The Beverly Hillbillies" and we brought our horses
and our longhorns and I built a barn on this property
and it's a functioning, working barn.
We have our horses in here and then above it is my workspace
which is the studio.
So come on in guys.
So, as far as I'm concerned, you cannot have a working barn
without a working saloon.
So this is the bar.
We always keep Guinness on tap.
That's my favorite beer.
I'm a big collector, as I said, of really odd things
and I got a couple of old death masks.
Death masks were a tradition of making masks
of important people after they passed away.
And even though that looks like David Crosby, it is not.
David Crosby is still alive.
That is McGinley and that is Taft over there.
So the other half of the saloon actually,
we have just a hang out area and it's great in the winter
to have a fire over here and we of course have our little
electric horse for those who don't wanna ride a real horse
and then we have our saloon piano.
So music gets made down here as well.
I think typically once the Guinness comes out,
the music comes out.
Over here we have a record player.
For people who don't remember the record player,
drop the needle.
And a lot of records, in fact,
when vinyl started being happening again
we just building back the album collection
and my kids totally love it.
They think it's like the weirdest and coolest thing ever.
[upbeat music]
And then if we go out this door,
you'll see where the actual horses are.
[clanking]
[loud fans humming]
So this is the barn.
This is where we keep our horses.
We're down to five horses now.
We used to have 16 cause we had a lot more land,
but five is much more manageable.
So I'll introduce you to Big John.
He's a quarter horse.
[mouth clicking]
He's a blue roan and he is 16 and a half hands,
he's very tall.
This is Neb, Nebuchadnezzar.
He's an Arabian, he's about 22 years old.
Hi buddy.
This over here is Bobby Jo and she's a retired champion
reigning horse and she's basically just retired.
She's great to have the kids ride around the arena,
but for the most part, she's done all the performing
she ever has to do.
All right, now you've seen the barn and you've met
some of the horses and you've seen the saloon
and the hangout area, let's go upstairs
and check out the studio.
[upbeat music]
[footsteps thudding] We are at the door
of the studio, check it out.
I'm giving you permission to stand on my face.
This was from Farm Aid, Willie Nelson.
Love him. [footsteps thudding]
All right, so this is the studio which is above the horses.
And initially it was not gonna be a studio.
Initially it was just gonna be a writing room,
but by the time we soundproofed it so that we wouldn't hear
the horses, it was sound proofed enough
for it to be a studio.
So we've made a lot of records up here.
And basically you can see, there's every kind of guitar
in here and I find, just like with old signs,
that have had lots of personality put into them,
a guitar is the same way.
It has a whole life before you ever lay hands on it
that I think adds to the feel and the sound
that you get out of a guitar.
So any given guitar that I pick up, I'll play differently
than the last because of how it feels and maybe
because of what the history is that went into that guitar.
This is typically where we sit and write.
The piano's back there.
These old drums are from the 50's, 60's.
I've collected quite few of those,
as well as the old RCA dog back there.
And then obviously we have a lot of pieces of art.
This old fried chicken sign was on the side of a barn
out in Tennessee and a friend of mine pulled over
and asked the guy if he would sell it
and I wound up with it.
We have an old gramophone that we've actually used
in recording, where we'll put an old record
cylinder in there and kinda capture that vibe
and then record over it.
So it's just, you know this room
is really about being inspired, it's about discovery,
it's about creating things that are unique and authentic.
All right, so you've seen where we work.
Now I'm gonna take you over to our little church
which is really all about just total inspiration.
So let's go.
[footsteps thudding]
So this was not here and we just plopped
it over here, sort of in the woods.
Come on in.
[upbeat music]
So I built this little chapel because we live at the house,
you guys have seen that.
We work in the studio,
but I wanted to have a place
that was just total inspiration.
So I built a little chapel.
The first thing I did was look for a old one,
found one online, believe it or not,
and they sold us the building for $5,000,
but it was so bug rotted that we only were able to save
some of the things.
Like the beams are old.
The flooring is old, it's out of a livery
which is what the barn has as well
and then everything else is kinda made to look old.
A couple of things I wanna point out.
I bought these stained glass windows on eBay.
I bought the sign up there and that guy up there
through a place called Docs Architectural
which came to me through eBay.
The doors in there are out of an old house
which I found on eBay.
So you can see I'm a total scavenger
for just things that are inspiring.
Everything that's in here is basically hundred years old
and has a story behind it and as you can see,
I love old Santos.
And so I'm a collector of those.
But I love the tradition of religion.
Just the history behind it,
so this place is just filled with weird things,
and this actually is out of an old church.
I'm not really sure where.
A friend of mine found it and called me and said,
you should check out this pew
and you can see it's got a little shelf
back here for hymnals.
So it's still, it's a church,
but it's also filled with things
that are not necessarily from a church,
but I do love just creating a really inspired place
to hang out, a place to be quiet, and that's why I built it.
Before we leave this place,
before we walk through my giant eBay doors,
I have to show you one thing that I did
actually specifically for my kids
and it is an old church bell.
Which I found on eBay as well.
It's an old church bell.
We had it mounted up there and the kids,
since they were little,
have been hanging on this rope and pulling this church bell,
so there you go.
[upbeat music]
AD, thanks for coming over and checking out my house.
I gotta go get my kids now,
so see you later. [hinge squeaking]
[clanking]