Name: Stephen Wilson Jr. | This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von #630
Uploaded: 2025-12-23T15:05:57.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Stephen Wilson Jr. | This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von #630' from Theo Von on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-12-23. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Stephen Wilson Jr. | This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von #630' from Theo Von on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-12-23. Transcript available.

Stephen Wilson Jr. | This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von #630

Today's guest is a musician and a songwriter, originally by way of southern
Indiana.
He's got that voice in him, he's got that power in him, he's got it.
He's got it!
He has a new single, Gary, that's out now, and a sold-out tour in the spring.
I'm thankful to finally get to sit down with Mr. Stephen Wilson Jr.
Man, I'm such a fan of yours on all levels, your podcast and your comedy and
your humanity.
So, yeah, it's an honor to be here.
I appreciate it, Stephen Wilson Jr., thank you so much, dude.
Thank you, too.
Yeah, it's really cool.
I think this is one of those moments where I feel, yeah, like, just so lucky
that I get to, that some of this job has ended up like this.
Like, getting to talk to people that, yeah, some people would love to sit down
with, you know?
So, thanks so much, man.
I appreciate it.
You're welcome.
You have, you just had, you had a pretty decent run at the CMAs this year.
Yeah, it was a, you know, I was-
New Artist of the Year.
Yes, I was nominated for New Artist of the Year, which blew my mind.
And did you win a Red Clay Strays one, who?
Zach Top won.
Zach Top won.
Very well-deserved.
That man has had a big year, and I'm a big fan of his.
Yes.
And I was very happy for him.
And I was really rooting for everybody.
But myself, I didn't really think I even had a prayers chance in hell of
winning.
But I was just, like, honestly, being nominated was a huge win for me because,
you know, I wasn't supposed to be there on paper, you know?
Like, there's a lot of, there's a lot of things that, like, I contradict.
And so, just being there, you know, it meant a lot just to be out there.
And it was really wild when I remember when they said my name, like, it didn't
feel like I was like, that's somebody else.
Oh, yeah.
That's not me.
That's like a-
Oh, for sure.
Well, do you think of yourself as country music?
I do, yeah.
I am a country boy.
I grew up in the country.
So, I am very country just by culture.
Mm-hmm.
And I cannot help but write country songs.
I grew up listening to country music and classic rock.
I grew up in body shops and it was all classic rock and country music.
Oh, yeah.
Old school and 90s.
And so, that was kind of my pedigree, my listening pedigree.
And then, I grew up very country, very agrarian, kind of hunting for our own
food.
And I ate a lot of squirrels growing up and rabbits.
And, yeah, we just grew up very country.
It wasn't trendy at all, either.
It was, like, just a means of survival.
My dad was raising three kids on his own.
And so, he just went out and killed food.
It was a lot cheaper than buying it at the grocery store.
Where, like, you know, one slug, one deer slug could feed you for, like, three
months.
So, like, that's the way he looked at it.
Oh, there's a beautiful group right there.
You guys' kids, huh?
That's my dad and his three little ones.
And that's me.
That you on the bottom left there, kind of the middle?
Yeah, in the middle.
Yeah.
And who's that dime on his lap, huh?
And I mean that respectfully, obviously, it's a child.
Who's that beautiful young lady?
Yeah, that's my little sister, Lacey J.
Lacey J?
Lacey J.
Yeah, named after Lacey J.
Dalton, another country singer.
And, yeah, she's his little girl.
And, yeah, she is beautiful.
And she's a beautiful person in general.
She's really kept our whole family.
Like, me and my brother right there, we're, like, Irish twins.
We're only, like, a year and a few months apart.
Oh, yeah.
So, like, we grew up beating the hell out of each other.
We were both boxers.
This is my dad right there.
In this picture, he had just won, you know, the Golden Gloves for, like, the
third or fourth time in a row.
And, you know, he was probably just running over to, like, Olin Mills or
somewhere at Walmart and grabbing this picture real quick.
So, just so, like, just that there's proof that we existed and proof that he
did this.
And I always find it wild that he had time to even snap that picture amidst his
life.
It was so crazy at the time.
Well, and for a dad to put that together, that didn't, you know, that wasn't
really the dad world.
So, he was a single dad raising you guys?
Yeah, he was driving a bus in the morning and then working at a body shop and
training to be a boxer.
He was wanting to be a pro boxer, but a lot of things, you know, he had to
really kind of focus on being a dad
and kind of had to put his boxing career, because he really had a very
promising career ahead of him.
And so, a lot of my dreams, I live kind of, you know, for him and myself,
because he put a lot of his dreams on the back burner to raise me.
Like, but he also created me.
So, like, he kind of had to do that.
Right.
You know, like, so, but, you know, a lot of people don't take that
responsibility.
And when I see that picture, I have, like you said, a memory.
Well, he either got the, he's got great dimples or somebody caught him with two
good hooks.
No, yeah, he's got great dimples.
He does.
My little sister has the same ones.
And, but yeah, I see that guy right there.
And about a year from that picture, he would have been curling my little sister's
hair
and getting her ready for kindergarten.
And, and even though his eyes were swollen shut from sparring the night before,
I have like distinct memories of him, like getting her ready for school
and being like a dad to a very young little girl, like, and like, you know,
crimping her hair
and curling it and, you know, being, you know, being a dad, also doing feminine
things, like,
because there was no one to do the feminine thing.
So he was like, oh, I got to be dad.
And he was really good.
And he knew how to do the dude, the dad dude part.
Like he had me and my brother boxing every night and we were hunting and
fishing and doing all the dude things.
But he had also had to be a dad to a little girl.
That was like the light of his life.
Wow.
That was like quite the responsibility.
And I look back on that and I have like, like I said, just such a distinct
memory of him curling her hair,
like while morning cartoons are playing right before we got on the school bus.
And yeah, he was quite the dude.
What was his name?
Steven Wilson.
Oh, he was senior.
Yes.
You just never know.
Sometimes they'll throw a junior on somebody just because they don't know what's
going on.
Yeah, I know.
You know, or they're just a NASCAR fan.
They'll tack it onto the back of their kid's name.
Yeah, like a donkey tail.
They just put it on there like a junior.
Like, yeah, we'll pin the tail on this child, you know?
No, I'm very much a junior.
It's very much a thing in boxing, especially like, you know, I joke around that,
you know, my dad,
you know, he was named after a martyr in the Bible.
My grandmother named him after a guy that had rocks thrown at him until he died
in the Bible.
Steven with a pH, by the way, which makes a lot of sense because I'm pretty
sure my dad was stoned when I was born.
Was he?
That's the joke.
Oh, the pH level of his brain was probably weed, probably, then.
It might have been plus 40 then.
Depends on if he was on some serious gas or not.
He did like, perhaps, the country cabbage.
The story of Stephen from the Bible.
Stephen, the first Christian martyr, oh, the first Christian martyr, was stoned
to death outside Jerusalem for his faith,
as described in Acts 7 of the Bible.
His executioners, including a young Saul, threw rocks at him after he testified
about Jesus.
Why did Saul not want him to testify?
Did he not believe him or did he just not want him sharing the truth?
Well, Saul at the time, this is pre-Paul, because Saul turned into Paul once he
saw Christ, like the spirit of Christ appeared before him.
And that's when he became Paul.
But at that point, Saul was very much a figure of the Jewish religion.
He was a very high-ranking Jewish official.
So, he was kind of like a high-ranking individual.
And so, he was really, in his mind at that time, probably just doing his job.
Right.
Not really knowing why he was doing it.
But then, he had very much a come-to-Jesus moment, no pun intended.
And that's when he became Paul.
And he wrote, literally, probably two-thirds of the New Testament, or at least
a lot of it, or half of it, at least.
This says here, and we use perplexity AI, and it says,
Before his conversion, Saul was a zealous Pharisee who believed followers of
Jesus were dangerous heretics.
So, from his perspective, Stephen's preaching against their rejection of Jesus
and his criticism of their misuse of the temple was blasphemous and deserved
death under the understanding of the law.
That zeal led him to participate by giving approval and overseeing the
execution, which he later remembered with deep sorrow when he became the
apostle Paul.
Wow.
Yeah.
Gosh, dude.
That's, I mean, that's got to be a lot to carry.
Because if Stephen was the first Christian martyr, and you had him stoned
because your faith wasn't there yet, and then to look back through a different
perspective.
Not much longer after that.
For him to be like, oh, now I'm preaching the same gospel without rocks being
thrown at me.
And now, that's a, that has to be a, quite the thing to come to terms with.
And I think that's what motivated him to write, you know, so many epistles of
the New Testament and became such a huge figure of the New Testament.
And there's a lot of books that they believe were written by Paul, like the
book of Hebrews.
There's like no author, but they believe, even he wrote like books that nobody
has any author to.
Like they just, they can identify his style of writing and be like, it had to
be Paul.
Wow.
So, yeah.
People love your style of writing, man.
Speaking of that.
I grew up very religious.
That's why I talk about, I grew up in a Pentecostal Nazarene kind of church, a
lot of holy rolling.
And I read a lot of the Bible.
Well, yeah, I just started going to a Bible study.
This is the first time I've ever been to a Bible study in my life.
And so, um, it's been interesting to start to just learn about different
characters from the Bible and just different stories and stuff.
So, uh, yeah, I'm just glad that we even got to talk about that.
And yeah.
And that that's how your father was named from Stephen.
I didn't know that story and I'll remember it.
Yeah.
And so that's pretty cool.
Um, what was that?
Yeah.
The church you went to, uh, cause you're from the Midwest.
You're from Indiana.
Yeah.
I'm from where I'm from Southern Indiana, Kentucky, Kentucky, Anna, they call
that area.
Like just North of Louisville, Kentucky, just close to where Trevin's from.
And, um, I would say that's where the Midwest and the South kind of chest bump
or shake hands.
It is literally a collision of two cultures.
So people have Southern accents and watch NASCAR, but they also put noodles in
their chili, which is a very Midwestern thing.
So yeah, there it is.
Uh, Jackson County, Indiana, right there in the Southern part.
Oh yeah.
The Midwest, they'll starch up a protein in a second.
They don't give a dang brother.
They'll put a starch right in the middle of a protein.
That's how they are there.
They love that.
I mean, I would go.
It's long winters.
It gets cold.
You need them starches.
Oh yeah.
I would grow.
I mean, I would grow.
We used to go to the AC.
It was an apostolic Christian church with my grandparents, um, and some of
their neighbors.
And it was in, uh, Illinois, like in pretty much Southern Illinois.
And that was just part of the culture.
Like people would eat their dessert at the beginning of dinner sometimes.
So they made sure they got their dessert in.
Like it was just kind of some of that culture.
Yeah.
You don't want to miss that.
Um, get too full and getting too excited on mashed potatoes.
And they're like, damn, I ain't got nothing.
It was almost a shame if you couldn't make, if you didn't have space available
in your body
for a beautiful dessert somebody had made, you almost felt a bit of shamed in a
way.
Yeah.
And you should be.
I think how much work was put into that cobbler compared t