When you're in a room with a guy who has a vision like that, it's just one of those things where you close your eyes and just see that vision - then you just go with it. The guys that I write with are so incredible, just like my producer Trent Willmon, those guys know how to bring things out of me - especially things that I maybe didn't even know that I had.

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.

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.

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'd love to do a live record, I'd love to do an acoustic record, I'm already thinking about what I may want to do with the next studio record.

I try not to keep my head in the clouds .

It's really helped a ton in the sense that we get to reach people who don't normally know our music. At least once a night at a show someone will come up to the merch table after the show and say they've never heard of me but they saw me on Troubadour, TX, and it reminds me that I'm not Elvis and anything I can do to get my name out there is beneficial in every way.