I don't know what the outcome will be. I put a couple away for my grandkids, like that. So I don't know, who knows? Maybe I'll start building guitars for a living.

I've gone a year and not written a song just because I couldn't think of anything. But I always come back to it because there's always that little buzz you get when you do something well and sing it out loud to the public. And people clap and tell you how great you are.

Anything that happens after I write a song...that's fine with me. It's up to the listener to read into it what they need from it. And that's part of the reason I write like I do, so I can leave the holes in the right places so people can say, 'Yeah, that happened to me,' and they're able to have their own little fantasy about it.

All gut strings. Thats just the first kind of guitar I played, it was a nylon string guitar. And to me, its the purest form of guitar making, and I just enjoy doing it.

Most of the really good songs are dead true. ... It had to have happened to have the song be there. Every time I've tried to make stuff up it just kind of falls flat. So the majority of my work is something that happened to me, I saw happen to someone else, or a friend of mine told me happened. There is a certain amount of theatrical and poetic license. People are supposed to like it, that's why you're doing it. It's supposed to be fun. It's not brain surgery, it's heart surgery. They're just songs.

I don't know what the outcome will be. I put a couple away for my grandkids, like that. So I don't know, who knows? Maybe I'll start building guitars for a living.

I've known Shawn for several years. And he's just an amazing talent. He's a great writer, a marvelous, marvelous guitar player, and plays really good fiddle.