“I love your cooking, honey, but sometimes I need some real food.”

If you listen to that song and knew anything about me, you’d say, “Oh yeah, he wrote that about his daughter,” but I try not to write them that they are so specific that they wouldn’t apply to anybody that has a child.

I always try to make the music that I like and think my fans will like.

I don’t write all my stuff.

I could have done a hundred songs, really.

“After 17” is a song I wrote when my first daughter went to college, so that’s kind of where I’m at in that part of my life.

I grew up with nothing, so whenever I got to where I could have something I felt like I needed to have everything I couldn’t have when I was young.

It’s a scary word, ‘cancer.’

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.

If anything good came out of 9/11, to me, was that people were so cynical about the world.

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 don’t see that it would be worth retiring.

Hee Haw was probably my biggest exposure to live music at a young age.

Somebody will come in with a hook and a lot of times they come out with something that sounds a little crafty.

I’m more of a basic eater. I still go into Cracker Barrel.

You think about people like Hank Williams, who stood on that spot of wood, and Mr. Acuff, and, of course, George Jones.

If you can last until you’re 40 years old, hopefully you’ll be mature enough to figure out the rest of the years.