I'm not afraid to go out on a limb, style-wise or with lyrics. I don't ever want to be afraid to cut those types of songs because radio might not play it.

It takes so many people to make a success story like that. It starts with the song and the songwriters, then Mark Wright's producing, all of the players that played on it, me singing, the marketing department, the promotion department at the label... It takes a lot of people to make a hit like that.

And it took me about 11 years to get a record deal, and I just had to work around and come to terms with the fact that what I was doing was going to be different, and I just had to wait until somebody was ready to jump on the bandwagon.

And for the past 10 years Ive been in a real commercial setting where people are all about numbers, theyre all about that bottom line. So its nice to step out of that and hang out with a bunch of people who play music just because they love it, as you can imagine.

So you do shorter versions of the hits, or you take out a long guitar solo or things like that to make time for the hits and new music as well. But I don't think any of us ever get to do as much new music as we would like to.

Nominations come and go. It is not going to happen to you every year, and I am very well aware of that

I don't go out that much anymore, unfortunately. I used to enjoy it, but I'm just so busy. Like last night, everybody else went out, and I just went straight home and went to bed.