A Change In Scenery In My Mind

Jim "Soni" Sonefeld

Cris Cohen: You had to live through this massive transformation that's described in your book (“Swimming With The Blowfish”). You had to do a lot of work on yourself, and you documented all of that. What I'm wondering though is, when you went to write it all up, were there things that came to light that you didn't realize at the time?

Jim "Soni" Sonefeld of Hootie and The Blowfish: I think I (first) sat down with a laptop in October of 2017. I had a spiritual turn back in 2005 and a coming-to-grips with my inability to drink like a normal person, which they call alcoholism. I really started growing in a different direction in 2005. But I didn't decide I had something to share, that was worthy, until 2017.

And then, to answer your question more directly, a couple of important things happened shortly thereafter.

I had been writing for maybe a year and the band decided we would get back together for the first time in 10 years to tour. So suddenly, instead of interactions a couple times a year for charity gigs with the band here in South Carolina, we were having meetings and rehearsals and planning a big tour, our biggest interaction with fans in the country in a decade. So all that exposure to my buddies. And while all of our lives had changed, it caused me to think back to how it used to be. And had we changed at all in the way we interacted with one another?

We do the tour, and I continue writing. I've told no one at the time that I'm writing with the hopes to make it a book. But it still helps me stay single-purposed, driven to create a manuscript that's meaningful on several levels.

The tour finishes, I'm feeling high as a kite on life. That was so great. We go back to normal life here and I continue writing, but now with a new perspective and sort of a new energy. There's so much more to write about. So I kept writing. It took me almost four years to get this in a state that a publisher was proud to publish.

So getting back with my bandmates certainly caused a change in scenery in my mind. I realized, “Oh wait. Now I have perspective.” It would have been a greatly different book if it was written in 2015. Because in 2015, I didn't know if the band would ever tour again.