John Osborne of country’s beloved sibling duo Brothers Osborne is talking life, spirituality, and psychedelics on the latest episode of Apple Music Country’s Hallelujah Anyway Radio.
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He recently joined host Fancy Hagood to talk in-depth about his experiences with psilocybin therapy and how it has affected his spiritual journey overall.
An experiment that started recreationally for the artist in his youth turned into a mission of healing in adulthood, he details in the episode. “It was really fun,” he said of his psychedelic experiences in the beginning. “It could be very intense. And there’s some profound things, but mostly it’s just you staring at your hand for two hours because it looks funny.”
It took age and perspective, however, to discover psilocybin’s uses go beyond trippy endeavors. “I didn’t know until I had gotten a bit older that it’s a very, very old plant and it has been used for a long time as medicine,” he shares, adding it took him breaking down in 2019 to pursue alternative healing.
“I had had a pretty bad mental health stint,” he details. “It’s something that I’ve struggled with my whole life. I’ve had anxiety problems since I was a kid. And at the end of 2019, I fell apart … Everyone just let me do my thing and allowed me to recover. So through that, I learned a lot about self-discovery and the root causes of a lot of things. But throughout this, out of all of my reading, psilocybin kept popping up.”
In the episode, he goes into great detail about the experience, sharing his feelings coming out on the other side of psilocybin therapy. “I feel incredibly differently,” he says. “If I ever feel fear or if I ever have anxiety or if I ever feel insecure, which are feelings that we all have and we’ll have them forever, I just remember the perspective that I gained from that experience. All the stuff that I thought was important beforehand, it just seemed so arbitrary and it just seemed so… I don’t know. It’s just stuff. And the only thing that I took through that and out with me was the love for you and my sister and brothers and family and my wife and everyone I met. It’s just like, ‘That’s it. That’s what we’re here to experience. It’s love.'”
These experiences will perhaps translate into the Brothers Osborne’s forthcoming new music, work that has seen the artists “constantly evolving and pushing ourselves to new heights.”
Check out the full episode of Hallelujah Anyway Radio with Fancy Hagood on Saturday (April 22) at 4:00 p.m. Pacific / 7:00 p.m. Eastern.
Photo by John Shearer/Getty Images for CMA
