I think country music is about honesty. Any art has to have honesty to start with, as the core of it. I mean, they're just going to manipulate you in one way or the other, but there has to honesty at the core of it.

When I was a kid, my step dad started this business and would go out and get lost cows and stuff. He was part-time truck driver, farmer and cowboy. He taught me how to ride from an early age.

Sometimes I think as an artist you tend to go toward the heartbreak and the sadness because those are the deepest and heaviest emotions you can pull out as an entertainer and as a singer.

And we carry onWhen our lives come undoneWe carry onCause there's promise in the morning sunWe carry onAs the dark surrenders to the dawnWe were born to overcomeWe carry onBeyond the picket fences and the oil wellsThe happy endings and the fairy talesIs the reality of shattered lives and broken dreamsWe carry on

I try not to worry about other people's music. But if there's one thing that I hear these days, it's that people try and put [music] down so tight that they take all the color out of it.

I don't think that the universal themes of love, compassion, and forgiveness (are present). (You're) searching constantly for the next step, the next level and consciousness in your spirituality, who you are as a human being and what you contribute to society or what God means to you is always a course everyone goes on.

The face that's in the mirror when I don't like what I see / I guess that's just the cowboy in me.