I don't really drink, but I've been around a lot of drinking and, at 18, when you start playing in bars, you start to witness the good, the bad and the ugly of alcohol as a source of escape. I wrote about it because I witnessed its use as a means of medicating - a lot of people using it to medicate themselves from hurt.

I tried to pay some small tribute to A Man and a Woman (1966) with the recurring musical theme.

But that is a valid, continuing service that that music - which is, in some cases, 80 or 90 years old - is rendering. And proving its own timelessness.

I embrace country music because of love, a love of what I came from.

I was raised in the Church of Christ, which was a very abstinent faith. And I just didn't [drink] - there was never anything that I found seductive enough, I guess, to have a romance with it.

[My grandfather -a miner] had black lung, and he didn't talk about it much. It's almost like a combat veteran. But he witnessed some horrific things.

I heard more of the stories from my mother and my granny and my aunts that would describe what they had known that he didn't often talk about. I remember seeing [grandfather] as a child. He was working in a mine that was fairly close to their home there in Betsy Lane, Ky., and it was so close in proximity that he wouldn't clean up or shower there. He would just drive back home. And I remember one time seeing him come in and it was like seeing an alien person show up because he was still covered in coal dust and soot, and it had a profound impact on me.