However you arrive at the ability to ignore self-doubt - if you can acquire it or possess it or find it or discover it - move beyond self-doubt.

My guitars, Cadillacs, and hillbilly music Is the only thing that keeps me hanging on.

Sadly, I wish I had been able to play ["Miner's Prayer"] for [grandfather]. Yeah, I'll never escape the influence of him in my life. And my - his wife, my grandmother, Earlene Tibbs - those experiences with them shaped me musically probably more profoundly than anything else in my life and shaped me as a writer.

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."

We share something in common with the fabric of the whole universe that connects us.

Country music originates with the colloquial, rural aspects of white America. It's really, truly, rural white America's blues.

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.