I loved both [Bob] Seger and the Eagles, knowing why they didn't play some of the songs I wanted to hear. But at the same time, they covered all the big bases, and the stuff that most people had heard. But they definitely had a bunch of album cuts that I wanted to hear that they didn't get around to.

If I hear a conversation and somebody says something intriguing, my first thought is, Is that a song? I write all year long, and at the end of the year I pull these forty or fifty things out and say which of these things do I want to record.

It's time the long arm of the law put a few more in the ground, send them all to their maker and he'll settle them down.

I get more respect from rap artists than I do from my own industry. I don't always write the kind of music that country executives want. Rappers are like that too .. my words come from the street, and their words come from the street. That slicked-up pop stuff doesn't come from the street, it's all pre-fab.

Health care's a great example. We spend billions of dollars a year in foreign aid helping people in countries where the money never gets to see the bottom tier, because the bad, corrupt politicians in the government that they have there end up taking what we give them.

I'm not the kind of man that holds out on a need for nothing. I'm as lonely as any man around, I just don't like to pick 'em up and lay 'em down.

I write all year, and at the end of the year I put an album out. And if sucks, it sucks, and if it's good, it's good. I just let it lay where it lays. It doesn't stop from doing another one next year.