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When I hear other artists that are new and fresh and exciting, then I get excited.
Jay DeMarcus
I love all kinds of music.
You learn really quickly how not only to be an artist, but you also become all of a sudden the CEO and owners of a company that you have to make major decisions about that I don't think we were fully prepared for in the beginning.
There's nothing worse than looking out and seeing some guy with his arms crossed while you're singing your heart out on a new song, and he's going, 'When are they going to do 'Me and My Gang?''
We love touring. We love being in front of the fans.
I'm surprised at the loyalty of the country music fan. People that started out with us at 'Prayin' for Daylight' still come to multiple shows a year.
We do pretty much the same set list every night, and the show's down to certain cues because we have video and all this production and lights and everything going on.
We've always prided ourselves on putting together a great live show. That's something that means a lot to us because our bread and butter is the live tour.
You start to compete with yourself when your catalog gets bigger and bigger... I mean, everybody wants the next 'Bless the Broken Road,' but you don't write those every day, so it's difficult.
I'm not really concerned so much with the industry, except in country music, as long as our fans keep coming to the shows and keep buying the records and we keep having success on country radio.
I guess, somewhere along the line, when we first came out, somebody thought it was a crime to be young and not wear a cowboy hat and sing country music.
It's so much fun to have vocal groups out on the road because we get to see them do their thing, and at the end of the night, we come back, and we all do a big thing together for the encore with 'American Band.'
There's really an art form to putting together a set list that flows evenly and that takes you on a ride and doesn't feel disjointed.
When you first start out in the music business and hope that you have a couple hits, the ultimate payoff is to be standing in front of all those people who are singing it back to you at the top of their lungs. And you know by the way they're singing it back that it's affected their life in some way. That's the ultimate reward as an artist for me.
Chicago was a big influence on all three of us growing up. I admire their musical integrity. When the opportunity came up to produce them, I couldn't let it go by.
When you sit there, and you sing the chorus - and then you look at each other, and everybody has the hair standing up on their arms - then everybody knows you've stumbled onto something.
I was raised in church, and we let our kids know who Jesus is.
Living country is more about your values and beliefs than cowboy hats or living on a farm.
I get along with everybody.
Are there people's music that I don't like? Sure, there are.
My beliefs and my faith are part of who I am, and I'm so grateful that I had the foundation laid early on. My mom took me to church from my earliest memories, so I'm grateful to have had that foundation laid early, and it's just part of who I am.
I think our kids live an extraordinarily different life than what I lived growing up. Pretty much everything about their life is different than mine was.
Country's opened its boundaries so wide that it embraces everything, and it gives everybody this new freedom to create now.
The hardest part, for me, is being in the band and knowing the way I want certain things to sound, but also having to listen to opinions, and very valid opinions, of my bandmates. So, sometimes, I'll have to have conversations with them as a producer and then conversations with them as a bandmate.
It's such a wonderful thing for me to be able to be in there and make music with people that I love, first of all. It's something that I'm so passionate about.
It's no secret that anybody who knows the music business knows that the numbers are substantially different in Christian music than they are in country music.
I grew up in the church and loved contemporary Christian music. I go back to the early days of when it first started with the likes of Amy Grant and Michael W. Smith. Those people that really pioneered are heroes of mine.
I want to be a part of bringing more visibility to the Christian music genre and give it some platforms that it may not have had before. I feel like, as blessed as we've been with Rascal Flatts, I might be able, through some of my own connections and avenues, to give them some visibility in arenas they've never had before.
We spent night after night out there learning the art of entertaining a crowd.
People would say, 'Why are you guys in country music? You look like you're in the Backstreet Boys.' We took so much heat. We always said, 'It's not about hats and Wrangler Jeans. It's about a state of mind. Country is in our souls.'
We've always prided ourselves on the fact that we're a band that the whole family can enjoy together.
I love watching new acts find their footing. It's fun to watch them early on in their careers and get a gut feeling about who's going to be a superstar.
It's really easy to be grounded again when you get back home, and you sing in front of 20,000 people a night, and your wife hands you the kids and tells you it's your turn to be on diaper duty and take out the trash. So it's easy to keep things in perspective when things like that happen.
I think Christmas, for me, has always been about family, as cliche as that sounds.
There were so many years that were going by at a lightning speed that it was so hard to kinda put our heads around what was happening to us.
You need to continue to find ways to engage fans to keep them excited about what you're doing.
I think the thing that keeps us motivated is challenging ourselves to see if we can be better than we've been before and seeing if we can stumble upon a magic that wasn't there before - whether it's a song, a performance, or a track that lights us up the way the first few records did.
A lot of people still don't realize that, before Rascal Flatts, I was in a Christian band for four or five years, and I had the opportunity to work with some of the greatest pop musicians and producers in L.A. I learned a lot from Peter Wolf; he was one of my heroes growing up in the '80s. He was a producer of a lot legendary pop music.
I remember as a little kid watching the Opry from the nosebleeds, so to stand onstage and be invited to be a member was really, really cool.
To work with one of your heroes is the greatest things you can ever hope for.
I was an '80s child, so I grew up loving all kinds of '80s rock. I like R&B, too.
I think that anybody can go home, put the record on, and listen to it note for note, but there's very little entertainment value in that, I believe. When you give people something visually entertaining to watch along with presenting the music, I feel it makes it a lot more interesting.
I love every aspect of live performance and putting our shows together and approaching it from the standpoint of, 'What would we want to see if we were a fan sitting in the audience?'
I think the 360 deals are what stands out to me, first and foremost. I never would have dreamed that record labels would be taking a piece of touring, merchandise, and everything else. The world has changed so dramatically from when we first started.
If people would've heard what we were doing back in the clubs in the late '90s, they would be really shocked to find out how country our sound really was back then.
I love my time with my kids.
You can't manufacture the feeling of being in a small crowd and connecting on every single level to the very last person in the very last row in the back. I think when you evolve into a headlining act and things get bigger, the intimacy and some of that energy gets lost a little bit.
When you do an arena show, and the lights have to sync up to the sound, and the sound has to sync up to the music, and all of that - things are really mapped out, and you lose some of that spontaneity.
That's what we all hope and dream to do, when we stand in front of the mirror with our Goody comb and sing into it, is to have a bunch of songs that have touched people so much that they want to hear 'em every night.
I think our live shows dispelled any misconceptions people had about us. When you come see us live, you know we're anything but a boy band.