If I have a talent, it lies in the creative process.

Everybody gets through a phase where it's, 'Ah, if I could just sound just like Vince Gill.' Then you figure out that you have your own voice, whether you like it or not, and that's what you should stick with.

I don't know that my voice ever makes sense anywhere, necessarily. I would sing bluegrass music, and I don't fit in there; I would sing rock music, and I'm probably a little too hillbilly for that. And country, I'm too much rock n' roll for there sometimes.

I don't look at it as mainstream country versus outsider.

I'm not reinventing the wheel here. I'm not Chuck Berry or Bill Monroe. Guys like that are from outer space.

I like more of the club mentality, where we're playing, and if we feel like we want to play a cover, we'll switch to that.

I'm not going to ask musicians to sit there and pretend to play. It feels insulting to the musicians to me.

I don't make records to win awards. I make records to make records and hopefully make the records as good as they can be.

There are great songs out there, and if I love them, and I know them, I'm going to sing them just because that's what songs are for.

My earliest memories of music are probably my dad listening to a bunch of outlaw country, but also old R&B and Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin. But, you know, I had rock phases and liked more modern R&B acts. I've always listened to all kinds of music, and I like all kinds of music.

I'm a fan of records. I'm a fan of listening to something cover to cover and not wanting to skip over anything.

It's nice to see people invest in what you do as an artist and sing the songs back at you and feel something. You get to feel something more than what you were feeling when you made the record.

It's a unique thing, and it's probably the thing I love most about songs and music - their ability to connect in a human way.

I want the dude in the top row to feel like he's down there on the front row in a club.

I don't see myself as some kind of fightin'-the-good-fight guy. But I always feel like if you don't like one kind of music or the other, it's just not for you.

Everybody likes to listen to a song because it's fun, and nobody wants to sit around and listen to 'I-really-have-to-analyze-these-lyrics' songs all the time.

It's man's work. My dad was gone at 4:30 in the morning and home at 8 at night, and he worked underground, and the last mine he worked in was 26 inches high in a lot of places. He liked the engineering of it - he liked the moving the earth and being able to extract something and put it back for reclamation. He enjoyed the whole process.

I'm always just looking to get back to the joy of playing music, and keeping it simple, as much as I can.

I can pass myself off as a 'Duck Dynasty' impersonator a lot.

If you think about what everyone else will think, you forget to just make music.

I didn't have any expectations with 'Traveller' - I don't think anybody did. That's how I prefer the process to be.

I always like to write the songs, and they get turned loose into the world, and who knows what happens to them. That's the joy of being a songwriter. You get to hear what other people do, interpretation-wise.

I didn't know they would pay you money to sit in a room and write songs for other people. I always thought that George Strait was singing a song, he made it up, and that was the end of it. But the instant I found that out, that that could be a job, I thought, 'That's the job for me. I gotta figure out how to do that.'

I was a car salesman, if you can believe it.