Christian music was such a huge foundation for me, even as a kid, and I grew to love Christian music not only because of the musicianship, which I thought was extraordinary, but because of the message in it. It was such a huge building block of who I was and who I would become.
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.
I am living proof - and I know this for a fact - that you can find encouragement and strength through the message that's in Christian music, because I've lived it.
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 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.
We write songs that hit different people at different ages where they live.
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.
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.'
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.
Some of my biggest commercial musical influences would be people like Merle Haggard, George Jones, of course, Johnny Cash. People that wrote and sang their own stuff, I really admired.
So many people in this world get up every day and go to their nine-to-five job they hate for 12 months a year for 30 years. I kind of do a self-check and evaluation to realize I'm very blessed and grateful to be where I am.
It's weird to think about being introduced as 'Hall of Fame members Rascal Flatts.'
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.
It was such a whirlwind for us for about three to four years there that, every time we turned around, we were pulled in 90 different directions, and I look back on that now, and they're such wonderful memories, but you kinda wish that you would've taken the time to savor them a little bit more.
