Billy Strings Escaped the Darkness. He’s Playing to Not Go Back.

Billy Strings has drawn from something old to do something entirely new. The singer and virtuoso guitarist, who is 33, has broken ground by using the elements of traditional bluegrass to become an arena-filling, chart-topping phenomenon, straddling the worlds of roots music and jam bands. Along the way he has also acquired a Deadhead-like legion of fans who follow his tours from concert to concert.

As improbable as it is that Strings can sell out cavernous venues across the country while playing bluegrass classics — in addition to his own introspective compositions, which he and his drummerless band often spin into long improvisations — it’s even more surprising when you know the path he took to get there. Strings, whose real name is William Apostol, was surrounded by poverty and drug addiction in his family growing up in small-town Michigan. Those demons have continued to haunt him: Strings’s mother died from a drug overdose last year at 64 years old. That loss inspired much of the music on his beautiful new album, “So Much for Goodbyes,” due out Aug. 28. He discussed the genesis of that album, among many other things, in our heart-wrenching conversation, which took place during a rare day off from his summer tour. To see Strings play, check out the video version of this interview.

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It’s pretty wild for someone who got their start playing bluegrass to have achieved what you’ve achieved. Was there a moment when you realized things had gotten really big? I went from playing in my bedroom to playing in coffeehouses, pubs and restaurants, and eventually I was able to put in my two weeks’ at my day job, which was working at a hotel up in Traverse City. At that point I thought, Man, if I never get any bigger than this, I’d be happy, I’m making a living playing music. I remember when I put out my first record, “Turmoil & Tinfoil,” I never thought about how the record would be good for my career. I was just trying to record these songs. Then, when we actually sold some records, I was like, Whoa. It was a big eye-opener.

Can you tell me about the title of the new album, “So Much for Goodbyes”? My mom passed away last June, just over a year ago. I was on my way to a show in Kentucky, and I woke up on the bus. My wife came back, and she told me the news. To me, it was this sad thing, this idea that I didn’t get to say goodbye. But when I told my manager about the title, he’s like: “I like that because it’s not really goodbye. She’s in everything and she’s everywhere.” So I like the idea that it can be taken both ways: So much for goodbyes, like I didn’t get to say goodbye, but also so much for goodbyes because it’s not really goodbye.

I’m sorry for your loss. If you don’t mind me asking, how did your mom pass away? She struggled her whole life with different kinds of substance abuse. She had a lot of unresolved trauma that she never really had proper therapy for, and I think medicating herself was her way of getting through some of that. So she had an illness that eventually she succumbed to. She died of an overdose. It was a shock to me because I had no idea that she was using again, and she seemed to be doing really well. Her addiction has caused a lot of trauma in my own life. She’s kind of like a conundrum because she’s such a beautiful, amazing, artistic person. She always was making art, these little shadow boxes and mixed-media art, and she would always be collecting these trinkets and pieces of junk and would take all this forgotten rusty old crap and glue it together to make something beautiful. Even before I had any of the songs for this record, she was going to make the cover. That was our goal and our dream, and we did it. We got to make her piece of art the cover. It was the piece that she was working on the night she died. It was the last thing she touched.

Are there songs on the album that allow you to feel like you’re saying things to her that you didn’t get a chance to say before she died? The big one on this record is called “Still I Crash.” I wrote that song not too long after she died. That’s the one that’s pretty blatantly me talking to her, just wondering where she went, asking where did she go and why. And explaining that I feel like I have to learn how to walk again, and how difficult it is to be here without her.

It’s hard. My mom died two years ago. She had A.L.S. and she died with medical aid. She decided she didn’t want to suffer, so she had someone come and help her. But I was able to say what I wanted to say to her because we knew when it was going to happen. But then my dad died at the end of April, and like with your mom, it was completely unexpected. I had a hard relationship with him, and when you don’t have the chance to say things that you wanted to say, it’s like an open wound — and you’re not sure when it’s going to close. It’s not better or worse either way, I don’t think. It’s just one of those things we have to learn to live with and try to remember who she was and love and cherish her memory and live up to her wildness. My mom has inspired me to really let loose and let my freak flag fly a little bit more, live more the way she lived rather than trying to be so cautious all the time. I feel like I’ve always tried to stay out of trouble and do the best I can to not get myself hung up. But my mom would just live life to the fullest constantly.

How does playing music help process the feelings that you have, whether it’s about your mom or anything else? It’s always been my coping mechanism, survival strategy and my medicine. Playing bluegrass music, it’s like a portal back to my childhood, back before I knew anything dirty about the earth. And it’s a way for me to go back to a time that was just beautiful and full of light, growing up playing music with my dad. And then songwriting is my cathartic and therapeutic way of dealing with things. I think sublimation is one of my main characteristics. Instead of letting this hard stuff drag me down, I try to make art from it, make lemonade, if you will.

I know you grew up in a chaotic way in Michigan. There was your mom’s substance abuse problems. And earlier you referred to your dad, and he is your dad. But technically speaking it’s your stepfather. Your biological father died when you were really young from an overdose. But how did music fit into your family life? What role did it play for you growing up? My biological father died before I ever knew him. I was 2 years old. And so when I say “my dad,” I’m speaking of Terry Barber. He taught me how to tie my shoes and wipe my ass and how to play guitar. Early on, it was a way for me to bond with him. And the better I got, I would get attention from that, so I just kept trying to get better and better and make him proud. I still do that to this day. I remember when I played with Bob Dylan, I’m calling my mom right before walking onstage and I’m like: “You’re never going to believe this. I’m getting ready to play with Bob Dylan.” But back when I was a kid, before any of the fame, it was just our way of life. If I wasn’t playing old bluegrass tunes with my dad, I was listening to my mom playing Beatles records. I remember being a little kid, maybe 7 years old, and she was playing the White Album backwards for me. Music was always a big deal.

What you just described sounds very buoyant and positive, but then there was the darker side. Was it hard for you to make sense of both the light and the dark in your family? Early on it wasn’t so bad. By the time I was old enough to remember stuff, like 4 years old, my parents were doing pretty good. There were just some Busch Lights and a few joints here and there. It wasn’t anything hard or crazy. So my early childhood was really beautiful and surrounded by music and friends. Then it just started to go downhill. My dad lost his job, and we started struggling more financially. That was at the same time that my parents were falling into addiction. I moved out when I was 13. I was trying to guilt-trip them into seeing what they were doing. There wasn’t any food. My house was no longer a home. So I took off. When I realized that me moving out wasn’t going to change anything, that’s when I was like: “Oh, no. Now I’m actually kind of homeless.” So then I had to just figure it out. But I never disowned my parents or cut ties with them, and it actually became this era of trying things myself. I could show up at their house with several carloads of minors and half gallons of whiskey, and they couldn’t tell me no. My dad would always be like, You’re not having all these minors drink in here. I’m like, OK, well, what are you going to do, call the cops? So I eventually just started partying with them. You know, when you lose people to addiction like that, especially as a young kid, you almost wonder: What is so powerful that basically took them from me? That’s actually what the song “Turmoil & Tinfoil” is about. I was staring right at my mother, but I missed her, she’s not herself anymore. Her soul and her beautiful vibrancy is gone. It’s just this gray shell of a person that is really sick. So you wonder: What is this stuff all about? I was 16 the first time I smoked meth with my mom. And around that time is when I started doing coke and speed and trying crack. And then a couple of years after that, I got to wondering about my biological father. I never knew him, and I always thought, Man, he must have loved heroin more than me. I wondered what was so good that it was better than me. So that’s when I tried heroin, because I just had to see what it was all about. I got a lot of that stuff out of my system early on. I never really got hooked on anything because I was always surrounded by tweakers and junkies. I saw how bad these people’s lives were, and I never wanted to let myself get that far.

When you were younger and partying with your parents, I would bet that there was some part of you inside that felt conflicted or uncomfortable with it. Did you and your parents ever talk about that period in your life? No, it was just what it was. Sometimes we’d get high and I would play guitar with my dad until the sun came up. We’re bonding again and that felt good.

When did you realize that you had a real gift for the guitar? That was early on. I started playing when I was about 4 years old. By the time I was 6 or 7, I could carry a tune, and I was my dad’s rhythm player. He would play all the lead and do all the fancy picking and singing, and I would hold down the rhythm. One of the biggest moments for me was I was sitting in my dad’s bedroom with him, as I would basically do every night, and he was teaching me the song “Beaumont Rag.” We would play the tune and I would mess up the second part every time. And I stopped us right in the middle of the song and said, “Why don’t you just play it and let me listen?” And so that’s what we did. Instead of trying to count, I listened to what he was playing. I listened to the melody. Then I was like, “All right, let me try it again,” and I nailed it. He was awful proud. He called my grandma, made her listen on the phone. That was a big moment for me. That’s when this listening thing started: I was able to listen to the music more intently and I could tell what chord was coming next. I used to think it was magic or something. I had no concept of music theory or anything. But my dad would play a G chord and then he would play a G seventh and my ear would just lead me. I’d be like, Well, the next chord’s probably going to be a C, and then it would be. It’s better to learn bluegrass and folk and hillbilly music that way than to try to learn from some academic point of view. It’s better to learn it on the back porch and to let it get under your skin, because then it’s not some equation, it’s a feeling. It comes from your soul.

Was there a time when you started to think that pursuing music could be a way into a different kind of life than the one you were living? I never considered that. Growing up the way that I did, music as a career seemed like a really far-fetched idea. Although when I was younger, I used to think I was going to be the next Jimi Hendrix. But I never thought of it as a career until I did some open mic nights, just for fun. This was before I was even old enough to be in the bar. I’d go up there and play a few tunes, flat-pick a little number, and I’d get a standing ovation. And I started to realize this bluegrass stuff really gets people out of their seats. It’s like, Wow, these people never heard of Doc Watson before or what?

Your predecessors — Doc Watson, Tony Rice, Clarence White — are some of the greatest musicians who have ever lived. They played this incredibly beautiful music with such skill and heart. And they never attracted tens of thousands of people to arenas. Do you ever wonder why you and not them? Yeah, on one hand, I mean, I don’t know. [Laughs] At a certain point, I stopped wearing a suit and combing my hair back with pomade and trying to pretend I was born in the Appalachian Mountains and my daddy was a coal miner and doing this whole Civil War re-enactment, and I started just being myself. I also allowed in the influences from other kinds of music that I enjoyed, everything from hip-hop to jazz to classic rock and heavy metal, death metal and hardcore. I feel like my whole brain is this musical goulash, and when I stopped trying to just be one thing, I could attract a broad spectrum of people, everyone from metalheads to old bluegrassers to people that are into more improvisational music like the Grateful Dead. I’ve got young teenagers to 80-year-olds in my crowd. And I play a little bit for all of them.

I read an article about you that talked about how before shows, you used to get real anxious and have stomach pain. Is that still an issue? I definitely get nervous before a show. Sometimes moments before I’m walking onstage, I feel like I might pass out. I’ve just got to get into the first song or two, and halfway through the show I’m the complete opposite. I have all this energy. I feel great. I feel super confident, almost cocky even. There is that expectation from the crowd to do something amazing, and also that expectation from myself to always do better than I did the night before, because this is my livelihood and this is my life, and deep in the back of my mind, I’m scared that this is all going to go away, and maybe I’ll have to go back to the way life was when it was really hard. There’s this little devil on my shoulder that tells me I don’t deserve any of this, and thinks that I should be in some little trailer somewhere addicted to drugs, not a penny to my name. So it does feel like I’m playing for my survival a lot. Each time I walk onstage, I’m playing so that I don’t have to go back there.

Has having a kid changed the pressure you put on yourself? Yeah. I used to put too much pressure on myself to the point where I would strangle the life out of the music. It was the most important thing to me. But when my son was born, I had a big change in perspective. Now, if my family’s OK, then I’m free to go play and sing, and I’m singing from a place of joy in my belly. I have this little cosmic listener that I can sing to and sing for no matter what. When I leave my house to go on tour, I’m on a mission to provide for my family. I’m not just out there to stoke my ego.

What was your parents’ relationship with your fans and with the scene around your music? The last few years of my mom’s life, she got really involved with my fans and the whole scene. She loved it. She grew up going to concerts and hanging out, so she would go out there and mingle and take videos of people explaining what my music meant to them and send them to me. She would always tell me, “You have no idea how many people you’ve touched.”

I wonder if that was a tough situation for her, because of the partying. Yeah, I wondered about that, but at a certain point, people are going to do what they’re going to do. One thing I learned from this whole thing is that you can’t change somebody’s life. You’ve just got to love them for who they are and accept whatever happens.

Do you think that’s true? People can’t change? I mean, you can change for sure, but you’ve got to want to be the one to do it. I’m just saying I can’t impose my will on somebody else and expect them to change. I don’t think that’s a possibility. I always wanted my mom and dad to have a good life and for my mom to have a garden. They’re getting older. My mom was 64. In my mind, I just wanted them to start being these boring old people that go up north every once in a while and sit at home and watch “The Andy Griffith Show.” But that’s what was in my mind, not theirs. My mom was living her best life. She was out there having a good time right up until the end, which is still inspiring to me in a way. She didn’t want to grow old. She’d rather run and gun right until the end.

You mentioned this idea of not wanting to go back to the life you had. But if the music had not taken off, what would a good life have been for you? Just working a job that I didn’t absolutely hate, making enough to have some food in the cupboards and a roof over my head, and not being a drug addict. That would be good enough. I’m 10 years sober from alcohol, and I’m definitely drawing a line in the sand. All this generational trauma has to stop with me. I’m going to give my son a life very different from mine.

This interview has been edited and condensed. Listen to and follow “The Interview” on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, iHeartRadio or Amazon Music. Follow us on Instagram and TikTok.