So many people are concerned with being the perfect 'something.' Whether it's the perfect singer, the perfect sexy girl, or the perfect feminist. I don't want to be the perfect anything.

My music wasn't written by Mozart, Beethoven, Bach or Schubert. It's written by God and me. They go "a one and a two and up." We start on the downbeat. Bam! And that's where we got them.

I was brought up singing gospel, and I really enjoy getting the church up on their feet, their hips swaying, their hands clapping, it's a great feeling to evoke that energy for the Lord.

I think being a Texan - we sort of have that extra fire in us as a breed. I just felt like from day one I had something to say and I wanted to make sure people heard me, and it's worked.

I work really hard - that doesn't mean I deserve anything, but it's really cool to see the positive reaction people give to something you worked so hard on. It's one of the best feelings.

I'm an entertainer. If people are paying good money for tickets they deserve the best show they can see. I don't get into lighting stuff on fire, but I do believe in going the extra mile.

The only time you truly make a mistake is when you commit a "mis-take," that is, you "miss-taking" the opportunity to learn a valuable lesson from your seemingly malfunctional experience.

Computers are another tool for the creative artist - just as a flat or filbert brush is. But there was a time when I left a jar of medium open by my work station for that painterly smell.

The fact that this is getting released, and people are just now hearing it, kind of tickles me. This is just awesome that the media is excited to talk to me and find out what's happening.

Her daddy drank all day and mommy did drugs, never wanted to play or give kisses and hugs. She'd watch the TV and sit there on the couch, while her mom fell asleep and her daddy went out.

I live my life in a way that I feel completely comfortable with. I don't struggle with who I am, who I date, who I love, what I say or what I stand for, not just sexuality but everything.

By the time I get done with my fans and my music and my kids and my family and my fiance and my horses, well, they suffer too, but, I don't really have much time left to do anything else.

Country was about character. Country's changed because of monsters like Clear Channel who bought up all the stations and sliced them up into formats. Our demographic is now the soccer mom.

That’s right, I’m crazy. But, I don’t ever want to go back to being of sound mind again. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to. Because as crazy as I may get, I only have eyes for Ju Yoo Rin.

When someone wants to lose weight, they will do whatever it takes. They can’t do it for anyone else but themselves. It has to be for them alone. Without that understanding, they will fail.

I love words. They're fun. I don't think any word can just be filler. There's no room for it. It's like a puzzle. Every song can be written a million times. How can you say it differently?

I definitely still have ... angst but I also wrote some songs that say it's okay to love, now. I'm happy in my life, and it's a bit easier to write happy songs when you are actually happy.

I think there's so much feeling among young girls where they feel like they have to be this perfect thing - and they don't. Perfect people don't exist. Sometimes people need to be told it.

When you have a Jewish mother who has a very strong Jewish family, it's very ethnic in its practices. Eating brisket, the food and the family and the interconnectedness for better or worse.

Sometimes I get so bold and I'm so confident about what I'm doing that I actually try to be more of a dork because it's a really liberating feeling to experience what it's like to not care.

I like for my home to reflect my fashion. I love adding earthy pieces to something very glamorous, and I love having things with a history or a story sitting alongside an uber-modern piece.

I'm pretty obsessed with 'The Real Housewives of New Jersey.' I usually watch it on the bus after a show with my husband Jimi. As much as he will deny it, he loves the show as much as I do.

A lot of my buddies enjoy the writing part or the studio part, and I love the live show part. That's the reason I got into all this, to play keg parties and bars. I still love playing live.

I work on myself daily to be a better person. When I react in a negative way to somebody, I sit back and think about why I did it, so I'm always working on myself, and my music is the same.

You can only release music so often. You have albums and the whole cycles and everything like that, so covers are a great way to release music and new things before the next album comes out.

I always say that if I end up in a relationship where I feel like seventy-five percent of what I was looking for is there, then I've already won, then we're all winners in that relationship.

I was aware of people staring at me. No one moved. They seemed almost in trance. I just stared at the clock in the center of the church. When I finished, everyone clapped and started crying.

Growing around great musicians, you just can't help it. I identified with it immediately. It was something that was so natural to me that when I started singing, it was almost like speaking.

There's a big difference between when I'm Tom and when I'm Conchita. Conchita uses very proper German; Tom talks in an Austrian dialect. Conchita gets mad if she is kept waiting; Tom is lazy.

If anyone asks me about the George Martin years I usually say I group all of that stuff together as the single greatest experience but I wasn't scared I was just really looking forward to it.

I try to be careful to not just say it's a greatest hits show because we've also made efforts to keep people up to date so to speak because we continually write and record and put out albums.

Your voice is vibrant for only a certain part of your life. There are some records I've always wanted to make, and I don't know if I want to waste this time beating on the door of the charts.

Only in Texas can mesquite have its own festival, then there's a crawfish festival, a festival for strawberries, everything has its own festival, with each town having their own yearly thing.

I was a big shiny, glittery-type person. Now I'm a jeans and T-shirt girl, or I'll wear sun dresses and cowboy boots in the summer. But at first I had to have stylists tell me, 'That's ugly.'

I was listening to this record by Paul Desmond called First Place Again. It's incredibly gorgeous. There is nothing better that you would want to get from music than you get from that record.

Me being in love with a girl and wanting her to be with me, doing what I need to do to make her stay with me; it affects no one, yet it’s terrifying to people and they think you’re a monster.

When you're a producer, you don't feel comfortable trying to push a vocalist when you first start out. But for me, I like to push the boundaries of what my collaborators are comfortable with.

I needed to find out what my goals were and what my mission was. After some quiet time and just seeking the Lord, He brought some people to the table that understood where I was trying to go.

But I always communicate with the audience. I never pretend like I'm just in my bedroom making a track. The whole point of doing a gig is, like, a feedback thing between you and the audience.

I'm a very happy man. I've seen how bad it can get, and I'm sure it could get worse if I let it, but all that made me appreciate where I am. Plus, I'm married to a very hot woman who got away.

I think one of the most wonderful things we can do as performers is to remind audiences that they can still relate to the emotions and feelings, as though the music had been written yesterday.

I've never really gotten into the whole labels thing. There were times I would cover a pop song, and people would say 'You sound really country.' I gave up on that whole thing a long time ago.

I wrote '('Til) I Kissed You' about a girl I met in Australia. Her name was Lilian, and she was very, very inspirational. I was married, but... I wrote the song about her on the way back home.

If you're not inspired and you're working hard to pull inspiration from somewhere and make a song something it's not, then it's very contrived and I don't like to write music that's contrived.

I am in control of all decisions that have to do with my image, which means that no one will decide what’s right for me except me. I’m not special. We should all feel this way about ourselves.

This is not to say, there never comes a day I'll take my chances and start again. And when I look behind on all my younger times, I'll have to thank the wrongs that led me to a love so strong.

The idea of The Boy Vs. The Cynic is the tension between the wide-eyed optimism in youthfulness where you think nothing can go wrong, "I've got the world ahead of me. I'm gonna be a go-getter.

I was tossed all over the place growing up, which I guess prepared me for the music business, but the one thing that has always been there, that has never ever left me, has been country music.

When a country is at war or in economic depression, underdevelopment or tightened security, it sets an affective tone or mood, which seeps through into everyday life via all kinds of channels.

I love kimonos because you can just throw them on over anything. Ever since I got my first kimono from Lane Bryant in high school and thought, 'This is amazing; I can wear it with everything!'

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