Everything gets hotter when the sun goes down.

One word, that's all you said and something in your voice caused me to turn my head. Your smile just captured me.

When I started playing music at East Tennessee State University I would sit on a stool with a tip jar in front of me and play four hours a night at a college bar called Quarterback's Barbecue. I wasn't thinking about doing it for a living. I was just making enough money to go to Taco Bell every day. People were eating chips, drinking beer and not listening to me. I'd had three or four years of people ignoring me, and I'd kind of gotten used to it.

The thing that I love, especially after sound check, is when I'm in that stadium alone. It's complete silence. I love that.

My elementary school is still there [in Luttrell, Tennessee]. I drop by my high school. It's a small community. I say this every night before I do the song 'The Boys of Fall' in the show - I'm really happy about where I grew up and how I grew up.

I do sing about drinking, but it's in a party way. I don't sing about drinking in a drowning-my-sorrows way, like in George Jones's "If Drinking Don't Kill Me (Her Memory Will)."

I had a notepad and I wrote down 30 things to make myself better just off the top of my head, and the next day I started to do that.