Anytime you do something from the heart, people just know it.

... there are a lot of shredders in country music - Redd Volkaert, Brent Mason, Dan Huff .. and guys like that

Country music has become the music that best represents the reality of American life.

We're all about trying to play better every night, not just singing hit songs ... we ad lib, and every night there's jamming .. it's almost like the Grateful Dead meets Buck Owens some nights, because we'll go off on little adventures and sometimes we do crash the bus!.

Alison Krauss is definitely my favorite singer that's ever lived. I've never heard anyone like her.

I try to write like the writers I admire - I rip them off in form. It comes from George Strait and Merle Haggard records, and country music in general is really good at that, the twisted phrase... So Im always looking for that angle in my own work.

I imagine there's a market for total depression. I grew up on George Jones and that really dark stuff.