I'm easy like Sunday Morning.

I grew up with the Grand Ole Opry, Dottie West, Conway Twitty, Buck Owens... not realizing it was influencing me as much as it was.

I am a country boy and proud of it.

The best compliment that has ever been given to me was, I was at the airport one day and a guy came in and said, 'Lionel, my wife loves you, the kids love you, my mother-in-law loves you, the family loves you.

It's quite interesting that in my growing up I had several influences. We had gospel music on campus. R&B music was, of course, the community, and radio was country music. So I can kind of see where all the influences came from.

I just had to find all my friends that used to be in the business. As I say, the music business didn't die, it just moved to Nashville.

Country music has always been about as close to R&B as you can possibly get. We're storytellers.