[Segue]
How many of you tonight have seen me play a show since two-thousand and seventeen, anybody?
If you've seen me play a show since two-thousand and seventeen, you've seen me play a show in absolutely excruciating pain
I never knew where the pain was coming from, it started in my fingers, it went to my head, it went to my forearm, and then it started up my arm, and then finally it went to my neck
And uh, I always just thought, "Power through it," y'know?
So uh, long story short, December 23rd of last year
I was in so much pain that I was lying in the floor, and I was crying
And I was holding my arm and I told my wife, I said "I can't stand this anymore"
So she made some phonе calls, friends of friends made phonе calls, got one of the best surgeons in the world, see me a Houston Methodist hospital
Went in and he said "Let's take an MRI, let's just see what's going on"
I came out from my MRI and he walked in the room and said "You're gonna be in surgery within the next hour"
And I said "That's pretty quick, that seems a little bit hasty to me"
And he said "If you don't go into surgery in the next hour and let us fix what's going on, there's a good chance that you could lose the function of your right arm for the rest of your life"
So, what they had to do was, they removed two vertebrae from my spine
My C6 and my C7, there was a ruptured disc right in the middle
There were two bone spurs that were clenching on the nerve
And they found thirteen bone fragments on my nerve, which means at some point in my life, I fractured my neck and kept on going
Was a four, supposed to be four month recovery
After four weeks of laying in that chair, I started thinking about doing stuff like this with my right arm
I started thinking about picking up my little girls or puttin' my arm around my wife or swinging a rope on my horse
And after four weeks, I got my ass up out of that chair and I went and put a saddle on one of my favorite horses, and I took out across her [?], they ain't laying here no more
Don't take medical advice from me
I want you to know this, the reason I told you that was because in that moment, no matter how much like, imagine putting yourself in my position tonight, watching all of you singing the songs that I've written, the songs I've recorded
Sometimes it's easy to be human and think, "Man, I'm Superman, like I've got it made, I'm Superman"
And I figured out really quick, I am not Superman
There's not a one of us in this crowd that's any different than the other, no matter what color you are, no matter where you come from, no matter what religion or political affiliation you are
We are all, we are all human
And that's something I had to figure out, and that's exactly why I chose this song to be my next single out to country radio, it's called "Human," here we go