I don't know about one moment that has pivoted my career. I do know that one thing that hit me and made me take a few steps back was a year at Steamboat.

One of the things that I always admired about Michael Jordan was that he considered his teammates to be his coaches, claiming they would always teach him something that he didn't know - and we're talking about the best of the best.

If you're true to yourself, it doesn't matter where you record your music or where you say you're from. I am an artist from Texas, proud to be from Texas, but I play my own kind of music, my brand of country music.

I think that no matter what you do, whether you rodeo, whether you work in an office, you work in the oilfield or you play music for a living, eventually if you do enough of it, the devil in the back of your head tries to turn it into work. You have to find new ways to make it new and make it exciting to keep that drive there.

When your songs are like your babies, even the one that you know aren't great, you still love.

As far as the persona, I'm true to myself. Not because I'm arrogant, but I'm true to myself because I believe that you have to stand for something. When you start sacrificing that, even if it's just a line in a song or something you say on the mic at a show, or the way you treat someone when you see them out in public, that all reflects on who you are.

There's that area, right there, where you can be too hard on yourself or you need to be really hard on yourself - I'm trying to ride that line by telling myself that I can always write better, sing better, what can we do to make the show more interesting? Pretend that you're the guy who's been in the front row for the last five shows; what would make it new for you?