Koe Wetzel is Living His Best Life with ’9 Lives’—“You Make Mistakes and Learn From Them”

Koe Wetzel sips an early afternoon cocktail in the W Hotel Nashville lobby as he recounts the number of times overconsumption landed him in jail. Three occasions—he thinks. As he talks, explaining he’s never done anything “unforgivable,” his phone screen lights up, displaying his wallpaper: Jesus holding a lamb.

The contradiction is Wetzel to a ‘T.’ If he wasn’t recording songs celebrating the pursuit of alcohol and women, he says he’d be a married father of two living in Texas as a preacher or a construction worker. He thinks he’d be happy with either scenario. But since Wetzel is loving road life, he’s not currently embracing the typical American Dream.

“I know my mom worries about me because she sends me a prayer every morning,” says Wetzel, who maintains he’s not as outrageous as people think. “But after I reassure her, she’s alright.”

Wetzel’s mother might not be convinced her son is on the straight and narrow—or even between the guardrails—after she listens to his new album, 9 Lives. Wetzel co-wrote eight of the record’s 13 songs, which dive into a well of conversations ranging from “banging” women, as he says in “Leigh,” to the difference between forgiving and forgetting in “Hatchet.” He touts heavy drug use in “9 Lives (Black Cat),” but then laments it in “Damn Near Normal.”

He sings, Drink 10 times the weight of a sober man / Ain’t starting my day until 2 a.m. / And I hate it, so I’m taking / A little melatonin, and a bag of weed plus a fistful of Xans just to fall asleep.

“Dude is so sweet but so rock ‘n’ roll at the same time,” says Gabe Simon, who produced the bulk of Wetzel’s album. “The duality of his existence is so appealing and exciting to me. He’s this sweet guy who’s also very funny. And he’s also a total badass.”

“Damn Near Normal” is the first song Wetzel and Simon wrote together (along with Amy Allen, Carrie Karpinen, and Sam Harris). They recorded 9 Lives at Sonic Ranch near El Paso, Texas. Simon remembers Wetzel walking in, and starting to talk.

“He said, ‘To be honest with you, man, staying up to 3 a.m. and doing all this shit to have the energy to be alive and put on a show every night is damn near normal to me,'” Simon says. “I feel like the job of the producer, and maybe the songwriter is to uplift people like him who feel like no one understands the life they live.”

Simon wanted to transform Wetzel’s life’s vocabulary into songs the public could digest. But Wetzel also wants to keep much of his world private. When he isn’t touring, he seeks refuge at a lake house he bought a couple of years ago in his hometown of Pittsburg, Texas. When he’s there, the singer is an introvert. He goes fishing, talks to no one, and orders in or cooks at home.

“It’s like my little sanctuary,” he says. “It’s my home away from home.”

The place also isn’t the first Wetzel bought in his hometown. After becoming successful, one of the first things he did was purchase the land where he grew up. His grandparents still live on the property, and Wetzel wanted to ensure it stays in the family. The quaint homeplace is featured in the music video for “Damn Near Normal,” where Wetzel is shown in his battered childhood home looking at a scrapbook of photos his grandmother Carolyn made for him.

Wetzel vacillates between sounding apologetic for his erratic behavior and being proud of it. He recalls watching a Steve-O documentary where the premise was, “Whenever you feed people so much shit, that’s what you’re going to get in return.”

“Maybe that’s fine,” Wetzel says. “I’ve just been myself, and then they’ve made their own assumptions. It’s kind of escalated to where it’s at.”

Simon hopes the songs on 9 Lives give people a peek into Wetzel’s universe—the tough and the tender.

“When we made music together, it was all about his heart, being honest with his feelings, and giving it the backdrop of confidence that didn’t feel like he was only being vulnerable, [that he was] also being a badass,” Simon says. “It needed to be honest but also bulletproof.”

Wetzel doesn’t like being called out on using the word “banging” in a song and quips that he hopes his girlfriend doesn’t consider the meaning of some of his lyrics too closely.

“You make mistakes and learn from them,” Wetzel says. “You grow from that. Every time I got picked up for just being a drunk dumbass, I could have stayed at the house. It’s been a while since I got arrested, so it’s been great. I’d rather not wake up in piss in a jail cell, you know what I mean?”