I generally have lyrics first, but you can't help that when you're writing lyrics you start to get a melody in your head. So they come kind of simultaneously.

I think Americana music is music that is generally more singer/songwriter oriented. It has more to do with the songwriting. The music, it's more like stories set to music.

To tell you the truth, I don't ever talk about characters as separate from myself.

I'm really influenced by Southern novelists, not many movie people. More like John Faulkner, William Faulkner, Erskine Caldwell, Flannery O'Connor, John Steinbeck, and people like that.

I've really dreamed of doing television. All of us do television, coming up. But when I was coming up, television was a black hole for actors. Now, television has a certain cache. Now everybody wants to be on TV because they're doing adult dramas. If you're an actor, it's like, "Well, get me on television," because it's the only place you can do it and also make a living at it. If my kids need shoes, I better do a TV show because I damn sure don't make any money with independent films.

I'm not sure that I'm really relevant as a director anymore. Or as a writer, either, to tell you the truth.

Now, if you want to do realistic, kind of heavier acting stuff, you do it on Amazon or Netflix or whatever or HBO.