“Half of them I’d hear off the radio and was probably singing the wrong words and didn’t even know it.”

To me, songwriting is the backbone of Nashville.

The music business doesn’t take up that much of my time.

Everybody was going on about it, so mom started hounding me more.

I have my little antique car collection, and when the weather is pretty I like to get out one of my old cars.

I’m usually just enjoying life.

Love is stolen in the shadows of the night. Though it’s wrong all along, it keeps going on as long as they keep it out of sight.

I have a little route I run down in the country, down Nachez Trace Parkway.

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.’