To me, the hook of the riff is what makes a great guitar recording. It's the backbone of the whole song. When you have a strong riff, it's the rocket fuel for the track.

I needed to get into a nightclub and stand up and present the material that way. I needed to present it live.

I wrote "Miner's Prayer" after [grandfather] died. I'd gone back to his funeral, and he died in 1979. And I came back to California, and I think a couple of weeks after that funeral wrote that song thinking about him, his life.

Music's the one thing I try not to analyze. I don't want to destroy the magic that has always been there for me.

The future has a lot to do with the past.

I'll never quit playing country music, or at least acknowledging it, always, as the cornerstone of what I am.

I always knew about as a kid, knew that that particular injury at [my grandfather's] finger had been caused in that disaster that killed his brother-in-law, my grandmother's brother. And he never talked about his own brother's death to me. My mother told me about that and told me about the impact on her family. And that's part of what you hear in the first verse of "Miner's Prayer."