Every band wants to go believe me, not everybody makes it, but they want to.

People get strange about whether you've written your own songs, which seems really stupid considering that, especially in Country Music, it's about oral tradition and passing things on and the songs weren't meant to be played by one person and then forgotten.

Making music makes me feel vulnerable in the best possible way. It gives me a feeling of balance.

Being in two full-time rock bands is pretty impossible. I love to tour but I have a dog and I want to see him. And, being a songwriter, you have to have experiences and do things. You can't just go on tour all the time, otherwise you get nothing to write about. It's finally at a point where the balance is perfectly right.

I would be a huge hypocrite if I didn't tell you that at one time in my life I thought the way that you made music was you got on a major label and you got famous.

There's no grand excellence to it. In my experience it was just almost the gulaggy boringness of it that'll kill you. You're just in this murk. And you're with other humans, but you lose all your human skills and it's just like you're in this plastic bag and you can't quite connect with people. You lose your ability to transmit electricity or something, and to receive it.

I'm pretty self-conscious, so I tend to work in a way where I say what I need to say and get out rather than revisit things. It's kind of a collage style. I realized that it had more emotional weight that way. I'll always be in the developmental stages as far as being a songwriter.