[My grandfather] was very, very fortunate that he was never trapped in a mining cave-in. But he lost his brother in a mining disaster on a shift that he wasn't working. And he was in a collapse where his brother-in-law was killed very near him in the same section.

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.

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've always been just kind of consumed by my own thoughts.

As a writer, I always tend to take the liberty and the great artistic luxury of a composite form of writing.

I am probably the last of a generation able to gain an education in country music by osmosis, by sitting in a '64 Ford banging the buttons on the radio.

Control success before it controls you.