Alabama in August, man. How humid is it? It's so humid that there's a heavy petrichor scent in the air—like it just rained, even though it hasn't—and the sidewalk concrete is dark is how humid it is. Everyone is miserable is how humid it is. The roadies and sound guys go from tour bus to venue to tour bus to venue, sweating from their bald heads into their creatively shaped beards and onto their black T-shirts and down into their camouflage shorts. One of the guitar players keeps going to the bus's thermostat to check and see what it's set at, making a noise of frustration like maybe somebody keeps turning the temperature up too high (somebody does). The only person not bothered by the heat is Billy Bob Thornton, who weighs less than the smallest box of the band's equipment, has a body-fat percentage of minus 42 and a BMI of 1, and who is shivering like a Chihuahua in his jeans, which, so you know, are Old Navy brand, women's, size 6, and the imprint on the inside of their waistband says DIVA in lady script. He tells me he's built like Homer Simpson's boss, Mr. Burns, “so I can't have baggy pants”—something about his toothpick legs knocking around in all that fabric. Keeping these jeans up requires a white leather belt that says FOREVER on the back. There's a story there. There are stories here everywhere. There are hillbillies at the bar next door, drunk since the morning, waiting for the band. There's a groupie in a halter top who keeps showing up at the entrance of the bus, hours before showtime, just wanting to hang with the band. Alabama in August, man.

Billy's in a mood. No one on the bus got more than three hours of sleep last night out of Huntsville. It wasn't Huntsville that pissed him off; Billy loves Huntsville. Each tour, the Boxmasters play at the Merrimack Hall Performing Arts Center and all the proceeds go to the center's special-needs program. Before last year's show, Billy taught the students a creative-writing class, and he left the class and wrote a song—wrote a song right there on the spot!—about how magical and moving the experience was and performed it that very night. But after last night's gig, it took forever to get through the sea of fans, and everyone knew the longer that took for Billy, the less sleep everyone would get since we had to drive into Muscle Shoals first thing in the morning, and people are tired. Billy wants to lay down three new songs today, one of which he's written literally just a few minutes ago, so here we are, parked outside the studio, “early as possum fuck” someone says, and the roadies unpack instruments and the owners of the studio ready Billy's array of gluten-free snacks and organic vegetables and Billy sits on the bus and eats his breakfast. Three hours of sleep and he wants to record three songs in full in one day? This feels like a mathematical impossibility to everyone but him. That's part of why he's annoyed—he can sense that everyone doesn't really feel like they can get this done, which means maybe they won't push themselves to get it done, you know?

Richard Burbridge

So he eats his breakfast and seethes a little. A word on his breakfast: It is absolutely horrifying. He's allergic to just about everything—eggs, wheat, dairy. He can't eat red meat: “I have type AB- blood, which is the rarest blood type. It's less than 1 percent of the whole population of the world, and it means that you don't have as many digestive enzymes,” and the part about AB- blood being the rarest is true if maybe the digestive enzymes thing is maybe absolutely not at all true. Most of the remaining foods he isn't allergic to rub his legendary OCD in ways wrong enough to keep him at about 135 pounds and in those size 6 Divas. Just the other night, the band went out to dinner and they were presented with a roast chicken that was posed standing up—like, Ta-da!—and Billy was just out. “That's a little guy,” he'd said. “I'm not eating a little guy.”

But he's got breakfast nailed. Breakfast every morning is these Bobo's Oat Bars—“the closest thing I get to cake”—but that's not the horrifying part. The horrifying part is that he has a vat of Earth Balance, which is a butter substitute, or maybe it's actually a margarine substitute, and he takes a heaping spoonful and he coats each bite with the whole thing until maybe half the vat is gone by the time this one tiny bar is consumed. In the refrigerator on the bus there is a produce drawer marked BILLYS ONLY [sic], and in it are blueberries, which he eats by the plastic carton, a couple of avocados, and the Earth Balance.