I watched their reactions and emotions, especially to understand what was what I was doing wrong. But then I realized that if I could see these people and take note of everything I saw, I could write a good song.

My favorite place in the whole world is Nashville. Because it's my home, it's Music City. It's like, everybody there is so artistic and so creative, and nice! Everybody's really friendly.

In the future, artists will get record deals because they have fans-not the other way around...The only memento 'kids these days' want is a selfie. It's part of the new currency, which seems to be 'how many followers you have on Instagram'.

Everything that happens to me gets put into a song. For some reason, I'm really comfortable talking about my personal life in songs. There, I don't hold back: names, dates, times, expressions on people's faces, exactly where we were and how it felt, what I wish I would have said to them in the moment. So I'm not only excited about sharing the songs with fans; I'm also pretty interested to hear the response from the guys I've written about on the record.

My brother gave me some good advice. He said, "What do you want to do? Do that because there are no rules when it comes to love. There are absolutely no rules. Do what you want to do." I think that was the most liberating piece of advice, because love really is unpredictable. There's trap doors, all kinds of scary stuff, caves and bears... You never know what's going to happen so you just have to do what you feel is right in the end.

Country radio is much more like a family than any other group of people that I've met.

I go to Wal-Mart all the time. The one in my hometown of Hendersonville, Tenn., is open 24 hours, so I go there a lot to buy DVDs and stuff like that.