I have this friend who has a theory that lots of towns have energies. And, for instance, certain places in Alabama have bad ones because they were built on reservations or built on cemeteries or something. But Nashville has a really gravitational, magnetic pull.

I live in Nashville, and I don't know how many people there would call me country. I really started in punk and anti-folk, but one of the reasons I originally gravitated towards country music is because most of those songs only use three chords. That was the easiest place for me to start, but I'm always trying to expand what I do.

If I could be more vague I'd write more about people in my life, but I hate hurting feelings or making people feel uncomfortable. I've done that before. Unless they're sad songs. Those get finished fast, but the mean ones often end up at the back of the bottom drawer and it's probably for the best.

It wasn't my dream to make music. It was just something I ended up doing, and no one said stop.

I was an exchange student for a summer, and most of that summer was in Ukraine. I used to say 'the Ukraine' until I was there, and one of the Ukrainian college students I got to be good friends with, he said, 'Do you say I'm going back to the Texas,' and I said, 'No.' He said, 'We don't say we're going back to the Ukraine, either.'

Book clubs, both online and in person, have become a large percentage of the reading public, and many of them won't consider reading books in hardcover.

I've always been a super-fan of television storytelling. It took me a while to figure that out in a career capacity, but certainly in a life capacity, I've been an avid viewer of television for decades.

Whenever a youth is ascertained to possess talents meriting an education which his parents cannot afford, he should be carried forward at the public expense.