“A country song is a song about life.”

Pour me something tall and strong, make it a Hurricane before I go insane.

When I was in high school, I don’t know that I really had big dreams.

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