I really think it's just the people you put around you. For instance, you mentioned "Kiss Goodbye," that was a song that was brought to me by Dan Couch and Dale Oliver. They had already started writing it without. They had put together this whole demo of music with no lyrics.

I don't know that we're beating anyone at their own game. I just think that we tried to include a lot of Nashville entities from the very beginning, just to see if that would work. We were trying to take my music to a different level and some people wanted me to change my style and my image, obviously that's not going to happen so we simply thanked those people for their time.

In the back of your mind you always want it to be successful and you want things to happen, but I've learned in my life that if you want something too much, even when it happens it may not be what you wanted if you set your expectations too high.

Pushing myself against my own will really, because some of this stuff is hard. I don't consider myself to be a great guitar player, so pushing myself as a guitar player or pushing myself as a singer, as a performer, and just riding that fine line between being so hard on yourself that it's counter-productive and being so hard on yourself that nothing is ever good enough is what drives me.

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 my brand of country music is that's been influenced by not just the rough-stock rodeo side or Ted Nugent's "let's get crazy style", but also the stand-up and sing style's like George Strait and Merle Haggard, and also the wild side of Chris Ledoux

All I can focus on right now is playing that record as best we can each night on stage, and that every article or radio spot that I do gives the best depiction of what we're trying to say with this record. The next door will open when it's time to open, and hopefully I'll be lead into the right one.