What I enjoy doing more than anything is, I have my little antique car collection, and when the weather is pretty I like to get out one of my old cars. I have a little route I run down in the country, down Nachez Trace Parkway. The loop down through there is just really relaxing, not much traffic.
If anything good came out of 9/11, to me, was that people were so cynical about the world - all you hear about on the news is all the bad stuff everyday, but what was refreshing to me was after that, you saw how many good people there are out there. For every one bad one, there's a thousand good ones.
I didn't realize until I was older what a huge music fan my daddy really was, and actually that my grandma played banjo at one time, and I didn't even know that until a year or two ago.
I've been a lot of places, and my wife, Denise, she likes a lot of the fancy restaurants. I'm more of a basic eater. I still go into Cracker Barrel. Those are the kind of people who like the kind of music I'm making.
I've always wanted to make a bluegrass album.
A lot of times when songwriters get together and write a song... somebody will come in with a hook and a lot of times they come out with something that sounds a little crafty.
The fan base that I've had all these years has come along. Some of them are not as plugged into the digital world, so they want to go out and buy the CD at Walmart or something.
I'm usually just enjoying life.
He's written some great songs. I thought that 'Blues Man' was a perfect song for me to do as a tribute.
Hee Haw was probably my biggest exposure to live music at a young age, because there wasn't any live music around my town and no one in my family played instruments.
Growing up in Georgia, I used to think people up north or out west were so different. They're really not. They're just regular people who live in small towns. They grow up and try to raise families and have a job and go to church and play softball. It's that way everywhere.
I like to write sad songs. They're much easier to write and you get a lot more emotion into them. But people don't want to hear them as much. And radio definitely doesn't; they want that positive, uptempo thing.
You think a lot of people get to be big stars and get a little crazy, but most of the ones I've ever met have always been surprisingly normal, and I've enjoyed that.
I think I've always approached making albums pretty much the same way. I'm just looking for a mixture of songs and topics that aren't the same thing over and over.
