I went to college in North Carolina, and that's how I learned how to play music. I learned how to play guitar when I was 12, and I was always in bands, but the first time I ever started writing my own music was being surrounded by a lot of songwriter friends in North Carolina.

Those situations were just taking over my entire life. It was fun to write in a way, because it helped me take a really bad situation and a really sad situation and make beautiful songs out of them. When I got half of the song written it was like, "Oh, this is great." It was like the one thing that was making me happy again.

Even with Neptune City, I feel like if you strip down all the arrangements, I feel like each of my songs is always going to be, at its core, either a country song or a blues song.

I went to college in North Carolina, and that's how I learned how to play music. I learned how to play guitar when I was 12, and I was always in bands, but the first time I ever started writing my own music was being surrounded by a lot of songwriter friends in North Carolina.

With Neptune City, I could have been singing about anybody's life that grew up where I did. The town I live in it isn't that magical, but when you're growing up, you think that everything is so important.

A lot of love records or breakup records, a lot of the songs can tend to be on the blame side and the bitter side. And this was good for me, writing, because it made me feel like I was forcing myself to be more mature and grow up a little bit. It's not putting the blame on anybody, it's accepting responsibility just as much as the other person.

When you are going through something that heavy, for me anyway, I couldn't imagine writing about anything else. I always tend to write about what's most prevalent in my mind.