Everyone finds their way to the scene in their own time. Maybe an older sibling passes you down a record, or a group of friends invites you to a show, and there’s no looking back. Maybe you’re a two-time Daytona 500 winner, one of the most famous and richest drivers in the country, and you stumble across a defunct Hopeless Records band on your Pandora station, and a switch flips. Here’s the music you’ve been waiting for your whole life.

Noisey: Tell me about how working with The Dangerous Summer came about. Dale Earnhardt Jr.: I’m a big fan of music. I need to be listening to music most of the time during the day. I’d be curating stations on my streaming apps, Pandora and Spotify and so forth, and I liked alternative music mainly in the 90s when I was young and graduating high school. That alternative scene kind of faded off, and there’s really been nothing similar to it until this version of punk came along. It has a lot of sounds and themes and gives you the same feelings as some of the old alternative does. I started off with Stone Temple Pilots and Lord Huron and a couple other bands, and they just popped up on my Pandora station, probably about four, five years ago. I kept hearing more of their songs as I started liking more on my apps. Then I started reading about the band. I was disappointed because they weren’t together, they had broken up. So I was reading about all that drama.

That’s what happened for Dale Earnhardt Jr., son of the legendary driver, the late Dale Earnhardt, champion in his own right, and now Certified Defender of Pop Punk. A few years ago Earnhardt was putting together a station on his streaming app, based off the Stone Temple Pilots, the type of alternative rock he had long favored since he grew up in the 90s, and he heard a track from Maryland’s The Dangerous Summer. It was a revelation. Sadly, by the time he’d been turned onto them, the band had broken up. Nonetheless, he reached out to the band’s AJ Perdomo, and a friendship developed that ultimately led in part to the band reforming this year. Earnhardt, who recently retired from driving, worked with the band on their video, “Ghosts,” produced by his film production company Hammerhead.

How’d you get to know the band from there?

I started following AJ on Twitter and we started communicating. We’d talk about music, or maybe similarities about what was going on in our lives. He wasn’t quite sure what his plans were or what his future was. And I was out of the car with a concussion for about half the season, so I wasn’t sure what I going to be able to do. We both had a lot of time on our hands. We started conversating a lot. He ended up coming to a couple races and had a lot of fun and we just became friends, really. At some point through all this he began to feel creative again and like he wanted to get back to music. I think it’s been great to see him put himself back together, and to hang out with the guys and get to know them personally. Sometimes you meet people you admire or appreciate their craft, and you might not always walk away happy. You’ll be disappointed meeting your heroes, they always say. But getting to know these guys on a personal level, they're great, really down to earth, easy to approach and talk to kind of guys. It’s been a lot of fun for me.

And then you helped them make a music video?

Absolutely. I went to where they were recording an album and got to see how they do that. When they were getting ready to put a video together for the second single of the album, I had just got done shooting something with a buddy of mine, a director, who I think is very good. We have a production company here in North Carolina and we’ve shot a lot of commercials, music videos. We’ve got quite a bit of a reputation in this area, at least of being able to do good work. I know their budgets aren’t very big, but I did see the video for “Fire,” the first single, and I thought it was incredible as far as cinematically, the way it was shot, it looked like it far exceeded the budget. That was kind of the standard—to do something as good as that video.

So they came here, and they brought some of their instruments, and played a little acoustic set in the basement which was pretty badass, so all my friends and family could see who these guys were. We had a great time. My friend, Chris Standford, who directed it and wrote it, and my production company pitched in to find actors and space. Me and AJ and the guys got down in there and we were grips and pushed things around and did the lighting.

You’ve been on a lot of other videos before, Jay-Z, Nickelback, Sheryl Crow. Which one of those was the most memorable?

Probably the Jay-Z one was the most memorable because of the location. I couldn’t believe it, it still sounds crazy to this day. We were racing in New Hampshire that weekend and my manager was like, “Do you want to be in a Jay-Z video?” I said, “Of course, who wouldn’t want to do that?” “Well, you gotta be in Monaco tomorrow.” I was super nervous, like, I gotta do it, I can’t turn this down, scared to death. So we fly to Monaco overnight, get there, it’s about eight in the morning. I’m walking up to the location we’re gonna shoot in. Jay-Z’s sitting on this wall on the side of the street, just hanging out, so we talk, and Beyoncé walks up. She must have been shopping, she had a couple bags in her hands, looked like she was having a great time. So we got introduced to her as soon as I got off the plane, pretty much. I worked with Jay-Z all day long, and we ended up going to dinner with him and Beyoncé that night. It was just an incredible 24 hours. Then we went back home.

You said the thing about not meeting your heroes. It’s probably something average people don’t think about too often. You’re this very famous athlete in your own right, and yet you were probably still nervous meeting Beyoncé am I right?

Heck yeah. I’ve watched them and admired them from the same distance as everyone else. I would think about how incredible would it be to have a conversation with them, or that they would know who I was! And for that to be a reality is incredible. Today I think about it and I still can’t believe it happened. But they were completely approachable, comfortable, normal, conversational, a lot of fun.

Does being a fan of music affect how you might interact with fans of your own? I’m not sure if you have a reputation for being a nice guy or not, I assume you do, but do you give fans time when they come up to you?

My approach is to always be pretty interactive. Try to be accommodating to pretty much any request, really, at any time. It drives my wife crazy a little bit. I’m pretty easy going with that. I just retired this past year from driving, and once you get to that point in your career and you’re going to wrap that up, you do a lot of reflecting and you realize how much that fanbase has been able to present opportunities for you, to drive the best cars, to be with the best team, financial opportunities. That fanbase fuels that. You do a lot of reflecting and learn a whole new appreciation for fans who support what you do. The guys who don’t have that fan support, there’s not as much outside or corporate interest. Corporations want to link onto that fan base and utilize it and tap into it. So those fans have given me opportunities that I never imagined would happen even when they were happening.

You did a video with Kid Rock as well. Are you friendly with him still? What did you think of him teasing that he was going to run for office?

Yeah, I talk to him once or twice a year. I didn’t think to take it seriously! He doesn’t strike me as the political type as far as the guy that’s going to get in there and get things done.