Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
There ain't no future in the past.
I do not like being famous. I like being normal.
I am not struggling. What I do, it is what I do.
It is easy to react if everything is going great.
I formally proposed. I'm a good Southern gentleman.
I'm the guy who loves being in the supporting cast.
I've always felt like every note of a song is of equal value.
I've always been more drawn to being normal than being famous.
I mean, look at her. Any idiot, you know, would quite taken with Amy.
Through music you learn not to care about the color of someone's skin.
When all is said and done the only thing you'll have left is your character.
When you ask a songwriter, "What's your favorite song?" he goes, "The next one."
I don't chase what everyone else is looking for. Being creative is all about you.
I don't want to impress somebody, I want to move somebody. Say the most with the least.
It really does take a lot of time to make records, to be in the studio and do all that stuff.
You learn a whole lot more about a person if they have bad breaks and all those kind of things.
Whether I'm making my own record, or playing a guitar part, I want what I do to have an impact.
It's so much more interesting when you're human. I hate making mistakes, but I'm not afraid of 'em.
I am responsible for me. I can kind of take care of what I need to do and should do what I like to do.
Success is always temporary. When all is said and one, the only thing you'll have left is your character.
A lot of people play to impress, but the really gifted ones play to move. That's the greatest point of ever doing this.
I never aspired to be up front. When I was a kid, I didn't ever look in the mirror with a hairbrush going, "Hey, I'm Elvis!"
Music is like having a conversation. All musicians inspire each other, and they're all geared to play something that matters.
When you lose people that are close to you it brings everything into focus, and the rest kind of gets put on the back burner.
I've always been the high harmony singer. It's never my job to know the verses! But I know the chorus of every song ever made.
I had just lost my dad and I remembered all the songs we used to go and hear at concerts, and the records around the house and sometimes we'd play together.
I would love to hear someone write a song like 'He Stopped Loving Her Today' rather than 'You're hot. I'm hot. We're in a truck.' It's just mind-numbing to me.
The funny thing is, people's perceptions of what a song is about is usually wrong a majority of the time. But they're still going to read what they want to into it.
My mom said, "What I want is a happy kid, not a rich kid. That's what I root for." She saw how much joy I got from playing music, and those years were leaner than lean!
I made records in the past that are as traditional as any other country records that have been made, but at the same time the records have a contemporary slant on it too.
It is not fun singing about losing somebody like that, but at the same time it was easy to write because the memories were so real and vivid and so much a part of who I am.
I'm a musician, so for the most part I've always thought that the musicians were equally as inspiring to listen to - maybe more so, in some cases - in addition to the artists.
Whether it is successful or not is not the exercise for me. It is not up to me. It is out of my hands now. I am not going to in two years have hindsight and say I made a big mistake.
This is just strictly me wanting to make a record that is the real deal. It is all the stuff that I have learned and know that I remember. It's what I perceive as country music is about.
Yes, the companionship is amazing. You know, you can get that physical attraction that happens is great, but then there's an awful lot of time and the rest of the day that you have to fill.
I can sit and analyze everything and beat myself up and say you don't quite sing as good as you used to, you're writing better songs maybe than you used to, but to me it's just the journey.
So I didn't have anything to do with picking the songs, but I got to musically take them in places I thought might be interesting, so it was a real neat collaboration among the three of us.
At the end of the day, all people want to do is hear a great singer sing a great song. They don't care about what vocal changes it went through. You can't screw up a great song and a great singer.
I've never been in the studio where it felt like I didn't have a voice. Whether I was co-producing or producing by myself, this community is the one place where I really see democracy at its purest.
It is not that I don't like contemporary country music because I do. I love it. I have recorded a lot and have had great success recording records that have not been very traditional country records.
My last two records that I made were both quite pointed in one direction and I think I do my best stuff when it's all over the map, when there's a couple traditional things, a couple pretty rocking things.
And from my place, and from the time that I went through my divorce, I also had my father pass away in the middle of all that. And it kind of made everything else just kind of like the back burner, you know.
When I look back, I don't remember the best of the best. I don't remember arena shows with 20,000 people. I remember funky little bar gigs where nobody shows up. The weirdest of the weird are what you retain.
The real amazing thing about all of this is I think I've maintained the mentality of a musician throughout it all, which I'm proudest of. And I'm still playing on people's records and singing on people's records.
We all get caught up in the process, especially when you have a wave of success. But to me, being creative is not about rehashing everything you've done over and over. It's to continue to grow, continue to get better.
But you know the thing that I thing oftentimes gets ignored and neglected is there was 10 or 12 years of life before I met Amy and before she met me, where you know, whatever happened was probably going to happen some day.
Well, more than me saying to the rest of the country music industry there is not enough traditional country music - that is not necessarily the statement in truth. I think more so that I, me, missed it more than anything else.
It would be fun to go back and see where all my songs stopped, because I think I'd have every number in the top 100. It never ceases to amaze me. It still hurts when one doesn't work, because you put your heart and soul into it.
The real beauty of it - key to my life was playing key chords on a banjo. For somebody else it may be a golf club that mom and dad put in their hands or a baseball or ballet lessons. Real gift to give to me and put it in writing.
Well I think in all the thirty years I've been doing this now and being gone from home and all that stuff it's really, it's not about what I've achieved and if I've become a better player, or played better ten years ago than I do today.