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Post Malone on success, loneliness, and making his audience know they’re loved
Last month Nashville shut down its legendary Broadway for Post Malone, one of the biggest pop stars in the world, who would be singing with one of the biggest names in country. “We’re shooting a video with Mr. Luke Combs,” Malone said. “We’re gonna be performing on the back of a semi-truck.”
Malone’s duet with Combs, “Guy For That,” is featured on Malone’s new album, “F-1 Trillion.” It also also includes duets with other country superstars, including Morgan Wallen, Blake Shelton and Dolly Parton.
Stars like Combs signed up quick for Malone’s country album. “I heard he was gonna be working on this thing and I just wanted to be part of it,” Combs said. “Big times for country music!”
To watch the music video for Post Malone’s “Guy For That” featuring Luke Combs, click on the video player below:
“Everyone here was so accepting and kind,” Malone said.
“That’s a testament to you,” said Mason.
“I disagree. I think that’s a testament to them,” he replied.
Post Malone wasn’t met with that kind of acceptance in the beginning. In 2015, when his hip hop track “White Iverson” dropped on the internet and went viral, he was called a “culture vulture,” and a “one hit wonder.”
And how did that response make him feel? “It sucked,” he said. “I was a kid.” He dealt with it by drinking, a lot.
“Did you take it personally?” Mason asked.
“Absolutely,” said Malone. “It’s hard not to.”
But he kept writing hit songs. “It’s not for the people who hate you,” he explained. “It’s for the people who love you, and for yourself, you know what I mean?”
A decade later, he now has more than 40 billion streams on Spotify, and six #1 hits, including a hip hop track (“Rockstar” with 21 Savage), a pop song (“Circles”) …
… and most recently a country tune (“I Had Some Help” with Morgan Wallen):
Across Malone’s knuckles are tattooed an eclectic collection of heroes: George Harrison, John Lennon, Kurt Cobain, Elvis Presley. “They’re all dead dudes, by the way,” he said. But dudes that are important to him.
Austin Richard Post (he added Malone as a stage name) grew up in Dallas, where his dad managed concessions for the Cowboys.
Asked what made him want to play guitar, he replied, “Guitar Hero. It was, 100%. And I was like, ‘Alright, let me get a real guitar and see if it translates.’ And it did not!”
But he started writing, and found what Rolling Stone would call “a gift for turning dreamy darkness into Top 40 gold.” “You’re making a baby with sound waves,” he said, “which is neat, I think.”
He has a baby now – a two-year-old daughter he sings about in the new song, “Yours”:
Yesterday she said her first word
She’s a long way from “I do”
Right now, she runs at me
One day she’ll run to you
And it will be your best day,
but it’s gonna be my worst
You might watch her walking towards you,
but I saw her walking first
And she might be wearing white,
but her first dress, it was pink
She might be your better half,
but she’s my everything
We’ll both love her forever,
but I loved her long before
And one day I know I’ll give her away
Buddy, that don’t mean she’s yours
“Yours” by Post Malone
Mason asked, “You’re already envisioning your daughter getting married?”
“I think about it a lot!”
“Is this the first song you’ve written about your daughter?”
“No sir, I’ve written a whole lotta songs,” Malone said.
He keeps her name private, but her initials are tattooed on his forehead – right by his brain. “I’ll never forget her. If you heard her cry, you’ll never forget her, either! It changes you in the best way ever. And the most beautiful thing is, she has a beautiful mom.”
He says both women saved his life: “Four years ago I was on a rough path.”
“What were you wrestling with then?” Mason asked.
“Everything,” Malone replied. “It was terrible.”
“You were already really successful.”
“Yes, sir.”
“So, what was troubling you?”
“That’s a good question,” he said. “Just loneliness.”
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Malone says he was spiraling downward: “Gettin’ up, havin’ a good cry, drinkin,’ and then goin’ living your life. And then whenever you go lay down, drinkin’ some more and having a good cry. And just like, ‘I gotta wake up tomorrow and do this again.’ And I don’t feel like that anymore. And it’s the most amazing thing.”
“I’m sorry you went through that,” said Mason.
“That’s alright. I needed to for myself, to figure who I am.”
At 29, Post Malone (who fans affectionately call Posty) is now one of the most popular musicians in the world. Yet, backstage before a gig in Nashville last month, he was nervous: “I got a big pit in my stomach, like, ready to go, big butterflies.”
But “Posty” has an intimate relationship with his fans. He frequently tells his audience that they are loved. “It’s important, because not everyone knows it,” he said. “There’s a lot of very, I think, lonely people.”
“Are you trying to give people something that you yourself have at times felt missing?” Mason asked.
“I think so. Yes, sir. I think that’s a good way to put it. Because I don’t want people to feel how I’ve felt. And I know they do. And I’m here and I’m on stage and I just want everyone to feel welcome and to feel loved. And that’s the most important thing for me.”
“And the love you get back is just as important?”
Malone replied, “I cannot even believe it, the place that I’m in.”
For more info:
Story produced by Jon Carras. Editor: Mike Levine.
More from Post Malone:
“Pour Me A Drink” featuring Blake Shelton:
Post Malone and Swae Lee’s “Sunflower” (from “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse”):
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Police-style handcuffs on Texas murder victim made investigators fear the killer was among them
On Jan. 14, 1995, Mary Catherine Edwards, 31, a beloved elementary school teacher, was found dead in her townhouse in Beaumont, Texas.
Her parents found her. It was a terrible scene: she was in her bathtub, handcuffed, and had been sexually assaulted. There were no signs of forced entry, which made investigators think she must know her killer. The police-grade Smith & Wesson handcuffs were always a big clue, but when detectives tried tracing the serial numbers, they came up empty. Early investigators questioned various law enforcement officers and came up with nothing either.
Texas Department of Public Safety
The case went cold, but as Beaumont police Det. Aaron Lewallen told “48 Hours” contributor Natalie Morales, “It was almost talked about like a ghost story around a campfire. Could it have been somebody that we knew?” Morales reports on the search for answers in “Tracking the Killer of Mary Catherine Edwards,” airing Saturday, Nov. 9 at 10/9c on CBS and streaming on Paramount +.
Thanks to carefully preserved DNA from the crime scene and the advent of genetic genealogy, Det. Aaron Lewallen, his wife Tina Lewallen, also a detective — along with Brandon Bess, a Texas Ranger in the cold case division, and Shera LaPoint, a professional genealogist — spent almost three months working together in a nonstop push to finally solve the case.
After all the early leads and the suspicion that someone in law enforcement had been involved, the family tree they constructed revealed someone else. Their chief suspect turned out to be not a law enforcement officer, but a man who went to the same high school as Edwards: Clayton Foreman.
And then they learned that Edwards and her identical twin sister Allison had been bridesmaids in Foreman’s first wedding. The sisters were good friends with his first wife, Dianna Coe, who also went to the same high school.
Coe remembers them fondly, telling Morales how kind they were to her when she moved to a new town and started a new school.
“I was new to the area … so, I knew no one. And they … just started talking to me and asked me my name … and we were friends from that point forward,” Coe said.
The sisters were the first people Coe thought of to be bridesmaids at her wedding. She and Foreman stayed married for 11 years. They were divorced by the time of the murder, but in hindsight, Coe began to see things in a different, darker, light. She remembered her ex-husband’s fascination with the police officers and their tools of the trade, like handcuffs and billy clubs. As Coe told Morales, “He had a billy club that he kept…by the bed. You know, said it was for protection. And I remember that he had ordered those handcuffs…Well, he had them hung over the rearview mirror.”
Coe also remembered a disturbing conversation with her ex-husband when she heard Edwards had been murdered and called to talk about it.
“I think I was, you know, crying and I said, ‘oh, my God,’ I said, ‘somebody has murdered Catherine,” Coe told “48 Hours.” “And — and he goes, ‘Oh, really?’ Just like no emotion, which I thought that was odd.”
Texas Department of Public Safety
A DNA match quickly established that Foreman had indeed been at the crime scene. And when Det. Aaron Lewallen and Ranger Bess went to question Foreman, they had an arrest warrant. They also brought something with them — something very symbolic.
Together, they had taken the time to work out an arrangement with the prosecutors so they could use the handcuffs taken as evidence at the crime scene. When they arrested Foreman for the murder of Edwards, they did so with the very handcuffs that had bound her the night she died. He wasn’t one of them, but in the course of the investigation, they learned Foreman had been falsely claiming to be a police officer.
The handcuffs — such a focus in the beginning — came full circle at the end. Bess will never forget how it felt. As he told Morales, “It’s a moment I’ll never forget…you feel like you got to do something for Catherine there…You know, like physically got to do for her, is take those cuffs that bound her when she was murdered and put them back on the guy that murdered her…It may seem small to some, but it was a really big deal to us, and it felt good.”
The jury in Foreman’s murder trial deliberated for less than an hour before finding him guilty of the murder of Edwards. Foreman was sentenced to life in prison.
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