The beer and the wurst were wonderful, but I was dying to be back in the South, where the livin' was easy, where the fish were jumpin', where the cotton grew high.

I'm very shy really. I spend a lot of time in my room alone reading or writing or watching television.

My contract with mercury PolyGram Nashville was about to expire. And I never had really been happy. The company, the record company, just didn't put any promotion behind me. I think one album, maybe the last one I did, they pressed 500 copies. And I was just disgusted with it. And about that time that I got to feeling that way, Lou Robin, my manager, came to me and talked to me about a man called Rick Rubin that he had been talking to that wanted me to sign with his record company.

When I think about country music, I think about America.

It's hard for thee to kick against the pricks

I Walk The Line was my third record.

I got really excited about it. But then we went into the studio and tried to record some with different musicians, and it didn't sound good. It didn't work. So we put together the album [Unchained] with just a guitar and myself.