My thing is you just have to try to feel young and stay young. Obviously you get a little older, but I still want my music to be young. I don't want to sound like an old dad onstage, so you just have to write music that sounds young.

I would say my fraternity was nothing but a bunch of farm boys; we weren't really in the whole fraternity scene, but yeah, that's a safe assessment of who I am. I've lived that life, growing up in agriculture and then going off to college and joining a fraternity, livin' that life.

I got my iPad, and I'm trying to buy books on that, but I kind of like a book. At the end of my life, when I'm old, I want to have all these shelves full of books. So I'm just gonna do the book thing.

I always want to have a personal relationship with everybody that works for me.

To have your first No. 1 as an artist was everything I could have ever dreamed for. Now we're keeping our fingers crossed, and hopefully we'll have many more, but there's certainly nothing like the first one.

When the show opens, fans can text to a number we flash up on the screen, and then we do a meet-and-greet with 60 to 80 people every night. It's something I love doing, and I would say that's probably more fans than most artists bring backstage after a show.

People hear me talk and they know my background and they immediately stereotype me as being a real, real country guy, and that's the right stereotype. But you also want people to know you're a little broader than that, too.