The show isn't about screens, and we don't have any video content or lasers or things blowing up. I want people to come to our show to listen. I want the show to be the music.

I am always interested in making myself as uncomfortable as I can. Sometimes I ask myself, 'Can I stand onstage and sing this song and sell it?' Sometimes I can't. In a room, you get to pretend a little bit and step outside of yourself.

When you're writing with an artist or for an artist, you have to help them serve their vision. That's the cool part about writing songs. There are no rules.

My wife has great taste in everything but men. The vast majority of the songs on my debut album, 'Traveller,' came from lists she made.

I get tired of people trying to dog out the radio for not playing this or that. There are lots of people who like what they play - otherwise, they wouldn't play it.

My favorite record of all time is Tom Petty's 'Wildflowers.' I hold it as the standard - in terms of sonics, sequencing, and songs. It shows that making a complete record is important, rather than just making a single.

I like to fish. I collect pocketknives. I inherited a nice collection from my father and grandfather.

Among my dad's generation, when you gave another man a pocketknife as a gift, it was a show of respect. I'll still give someone the knife out of my pocket.

I like the old days when, if I wrote a song and I recorded it, it didn't mean somebody else couldn't record it.

Why would you want to dictate somebody else's taste or happiness? Music is supposed to be joyful and move people, and however that gets accomplished for different people, it's all good.

If there's one kind of music that makes somebody happy, how is that a bad thing? And if there's another kind that makes somebody else happy, how is that a bad thing? I don't get why anybody cares about what they don't like so much.

I always just try to write the best songs that I can at any given time, and sometimes those songs are for me, and sometimes they're for other people. And that's to be evaluated after the fact.

I write the songs and hand it over to the world and see what happens. But the things that I've written for people that have been hits, I don't know that I would have directed them in the right path, but they definitely wound up on the right path.

If I'm feeling like rock, we'll do some of that, and if I'm feeling some other way, we might do some of that. So, that's typically how I record and write and play music and anything else.

I was in a bluegrass band. I made two records with a band called the SteelDrivers. They were nominated for two Grammys. I then I was in a rock band called the Junction Brothers; we made kind of '70s hard rock music.

You always hope for the best when you put something out and try to make the best music you can make, but you can't control what happens after that.

I never was a liner note junkie. I didn't know who produced records or there was such a thing as a straight songwriter. I always assumed that everybody that was singing a song wrote it or made it up.

As long as people are buying music, it's good for everybody.

Music is not a game to me. I take it very seriously.

At the end of the day, I just have to do what I do and let it be what it's gonna be.

In the kind of fast-food world that we live in, where everything's so fast paced and it's, 'Look over here! Look over there,' we don't really take the time to sit down and enjoy music - or anything else, for that matter.

I like to put a record on and then listen to it again and then sit down and make my friends listen to it.

We have a history in country music of writing about the darker side of things - maybe not as much in modern times, but there's a lot of cheating and self-deprecation. We sort it out in song, in country music, as a genre.

I like to put something on and want to listen to it again once I get done listening to it, not feel like I need an ear break.