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.

When I'm a ship tossed around on the waves, Up on a highwire that's ready to break. When I've had just about all I can take, baby you save me

I don't really drink before a show. That's my only drinking rule. Especially with today's cell-phone cameras, there's no win to it.

I'll admit I'm a workaholic.

I didn't need more fame or money. I needed more heart.

I have never said a negative thing about anybody, even when the whole world was saying I was gay because Renée Zellweger cited fraud.

Certain nights, when everything's perfect and we have thousands of people partying their asses off, I break my rule and have a drink onstage. I've never done a show drunk. Well, I take that back. In the early days I did.