The real beauty of it - key to my life was playing key chords on a banjo. For somebody else it may be a golf club that mom and dad put in their hands or a baseball or ballet lessons. Real gift to give to me and put it in writing.

The funny thing is, people's perceptions of what a song is about is usually wrong a majority of the time. But they're still going to read what they want to into it.

When I look back, I don't remember the best of the best. I don't remember arena shows with 20,000 people. I remember funky little bar gigs where nobody shows up. The weirdest of the weird are what you retain.

It is not that I don't like contemporary country music because I do. I love it. I have recorded a lot and have had great success recording records that have not been very traditional country records.

With The Key, it was, I had gone through a divorce and losing my father, and just kinda really reminiscing about how much I loved the traditional side of country music, so I made a record that was really traditional from start to finish.

Everything I've done feels like I'm just as much a part of it as if I was the producer. It's still the same job: all of us together figuring out the common good for a song. That's the only thing that matters. It's not like, "I'm the boss, and I'm gonna tell you what to play."

I've always been the high harmony singer. It's never my job to know the verses! But I know the chorus of every song ever made.