Top 35 Charles Kelley Quotes

I’ve got a lot of little quirks and moments that – my wife, she knows exactly what to say and how to handle me, ’cause I can be hard to handle.

When you do anything for eight or nine years, you start getting a little comfortable; you start taking things for granted.

That’s a different side of the brain going into the studio, as opposed to doing a live show, obviously.

It was a total dream of mine to have my voice on an album with Stevie Nicks.

My wife thinks I’m a narcissist, but I just think it’s hilarious going on YouTube and seeing these covers. There are so many of them – literally hundreds! It’s flattering.

With Lady Antebellum, there’s always pressure. It’s hard for commerce not to rear its ugly head when you’re making decisions.

I’m a real fan of that Foster the People song ‘Pumped Up Kicks.’

When I come home and have a new song I’ve written, she gives me an honest critique. If my wife likes it, I know I have something.

I see too many celebrity kids who can’t sing. If you don’t have it, give it up, because people are brutal. I never want my kids to feel like they have to live up to what I’ve done.

I wanted to make music that spoke to me, without having the expectation of success that comes with Lady Antebellum.

The perfect winter’s night for me would be with all the family together. As you get a little older and everybody has their jobs and then families and kids, it definitely becomes harder to get everybody together at once.

The country crowd just has fun.

With anything you do in life, there are days where you’re worn out and you don’t want to do it for a second.

That’s kind of the theme of Own the Night. It’s about those nights that are so memorable you could live them forever.

It’s hard to make great art when you’ve got too much pressure.

One of Lady Antebellum’s first big tours was opening up for Kenny Chesney.

We’ve become so successful that it’s become a machine: There’s a lot of people relying on you. You’ve got 100 people out on the road and working for you. You want to stay at the top.

We partied with the royal rich people, and we felt like rock stars. We drank all the whiskey in the place.

I love whiskey, and I’m a big fan of ‘Mad Men,’ so anything that Don Draper does, I like to do. But I want Don Draper to get back to where he was in the first season. I like him married and gallivanting around.

I’m not going to lie, I love TV. I watch a ton of it – golf, HGTV, football.

When you’re making a record – and I’ve never said this to anybody, but it’s true – when you’re making a record, and you go, ‘Man, this might win a Grammy!’ you feel that level of confidence when you’re making a record.

I’ve always thought ‘Southern Accents’ would make an amazing country song. It’s always spoken to me. I’ve always loved it. Every time I hear that song, it reminds me of my dad.

I think the key to marriage is find your best friend.

In my career, I’ve always felt like all great things came at once, and when something goes bad, it always seems that everything else seems to start going bad.

There’s definitely been some songs in the past that we’ve put out, and it was purely us going, ‘Okay, we think radio will play this. We think this will be a hit. This will be big for the show,’ and all this stuff. But it’s like, do you really believe in it?

I never want to cut music ever again that I’m just kind of into, because we definitely didn’t do that in the beginning.

Dave and I had been song writers in Nashville, trying to get around, out hustling, trying to meet people. We randomly met Hillary out in town one night. She said she was a singer. I asked her if she would like to write some songs with Dave and me, and a week later she came over. Instantaneously we had this chemistry.

I’m 6′ 6”. It’s hard to find golf clubs that fit you right and work right.

To me, the best music always comes when – it sounds cliche, but you just try to block out the noise and try to not have any pressure with it and take your time.

I love writing with other artists, I really do. Because you can try to guess what they would want to say and how they would sing it.

My wife and I met right down the street. Our single, ‘Just a Kiss’ is kind of about that moment. I was trying to replicate that dance-off between Justin Timberlake and Brittany Spears.

If we were to use the success of ‘Need You Now’ as the barometer for every other song, then we’ll probably be highly disappointed. That song will probably undoubtedly be the biggest song of our career. We can hopefully have success for 20 years, but we may not ever have the success of that one particular song again.

I think for new artists the hardest thing is putting the face with a name. People maybe heard our song on the radio or something but until they get several impressions of who you are – from whatever it is, whether TV or a live show, I feel like they don’t quite connect the dots.

If I am going to do something outside of Lady Antebellum, it’s got to make a statement. Otherwise, why do it?

Growing up I played in garage bands and cover bands with my older brother, and he got us a gig opening up for some hippie jam band. I was 15. I felt like such an adult!