Growing up in Nashville, especially in a music business family, means growing up with knowledge that seems like common sense until later in life when you realize people spend thousands of dollars a semester trying to learn or pretending to learn while looking for some intern job on music row.

Growing up in Nashville, especially in a music business family, means growing up with knowledge that seems like common sense until later in life when you realize people spend thousands of dollars a semester trying to learn or pretending to learn while looking for some intern job on music row.

I think when people watch a lot of artists, they're expecting this showiness, and I'm cracking jokes with people. I'm heckling back. I'm interacting.

I used to say that I was making "country music," because it was the quickest, easiest answer. I'm obviously heavily influenced by country music. There was a three-year stint in my life where I listened to nothing else, so, I learned it very well.

I have this friend who has a theory that lots of towns have energies. And, for instance, certain places in Alabama have bad ones because they were built on reservations or built on cemeteries or something. But Nashville has a really gravitational, magnetic pull.

When I did the video for "Piledriver Waltz," I was thinking about rodeo clowns, and how they're risking their lives just to keep an entire arena laughing. They're in danger!

I was probably 16.I played - I tried to play these songs that I had written. And, this was a common theme when I was younger: I would write a song about somebody, and they would come to my show. I wouldn't be able to play the whole thing, because, there would be some giant, loaded secret coming up in like, the third verse, or something.