I love Nashville, and I love the South, but on a professional level, I had started feeling smothered by the Nashville way of doing things.

Once you get away from where you're from, you look at it in a different way.

I'm a big fan of '70s records where artists could draw on whatever influences they wanted.

No matter what you do for a living all we have is music to get through certain situations.

Any album that I ever put out I'm going to send it to country radio first.

I never excluded any genre on my first record.

I've been in LA for 5 years now, and it's been very freeing creatively.