If you’re going to document your own journey, the jokes work better in the first person, just like the stories do.
I think probably songwriters are gonna be the toughest critics… I think of it as a community. And we all sort of feed off of each other.
Good sounds, they just make you feel good.
I’m not trying to steer people in a direction. I’m just trying to move them. Wherever it takes them, it doesn’t matter to me. I just want them to be moved in one way or another, and that’s a hard thing to do, I think.
I went to school for creative writing in college, and I wound up about six hours short of my degree.
If I spend time at the front of the process worrying about connecting themes, then I won’t write the best songs.
As far as being satisfied, I just don’t think you should work towards being satisfied. If everybody were satisfied, we’d never get anything done.
I go to the movies a lot on off days. I exercise. I have routines that I go by.
I don’t think I’m a country artist, really. I’m a country person, but I don’t think I’m necessarily a country singer or musician.
I like not having to worry about paying the bills, but I have to watch myself because I don’t come from money.
The world changes fast, and a lot of the old country folks have a hard time keeping up with it, and it makes them sad.
Sometimes a song becomes rhetoric, but you have to really empathise. You also have to leave room for both sides of the argument: even if you’re not telling the other side, you have to put that part in parentheses and make sure it’s understood.
When I stopped drinking… there were so many things I had to face that I didn’t even realize were part of my makeup before. When you do that and have any changes that severe, you lose a lot of things, both good and bad.
I spend a lot of time wondering how to best support the people that I love, because I think sometimes that means getting out of the way. When should I leave them alone to have their own life?
I’d rather have 1000 of our fans than 10,000 Kid Rock fans!
Whatever needed to be done, I need to know how to do it just as well as my wife. You know, for us to be able to really balance the parenting. It was very humbling, and it was also, um – terrifying. Because, you know, giving a baby a bath for the first time is one of the scariest things you can do on this whole earth.
I try to make statements that aren’t broad because that doesn’t make for good writing. I don’t get commentary as my job, because I’m not very good at that. The way I do it is by writing songs, and I have to be small; I have to make the stories a bit personal.
The more you read, the better you are at writing, no matter what you’re writing. A lot of songwriters miss that and don’t see the connection there, and I’ve always felt like you’re more able to communicate if you have a bigger toolbox to work with.
I don’t care what ‘Pitchfork’ says. They write from a place that’s a little too self-aware for me to really give a damn about what they’re talking about.
My wife is so very important to me that it’s made my mom more important to me. It’s made every woman I know more important to me.
I think for anything to be successful, your problems have to become different problems over time.
Early on, I had to structure my ideas of success around things like, ‘Can I go back and listen to the record months or years after I made it and still get some enjoyment out of it?’ Or ‘Have I said what I wanted to say on this album? Did it connect with people on a personal level, even if it’s a small number of people?’
My favorite thing about going to concerts has always been looking around and thinking that there’s a lot of people in here that are very much like me, a lot of people in here I could have a full conversation with.
I’ve always wanted to pull off ‘No One is to Blame’ by Howard Jones. I’ve done that a couple times in solo shows, but I can’t figure out how to do that with a full band and make it work.
It’s nice to feel like you have more in common with people rather than more differences.
When I was writing ‘Southeastern,’ I’d just recently gotten sober. For me, that was a major turning point in my life. It changed things I did on a day-to-day basis. My whole routine was upended. It took me some time to get used to that and figure out how do I keep myself entertained.
I feel like people have a lot of the same good times and the same interests pretty much anywhere.
Something that really helps when it comes to writing songs is you start to notice how children learn and how we all had to learn in the first place, starting from the ground up. It gives you a new perspective.
If you’re the person whose problems were solved when you were born, your job is to try and help the people who aren’t in that situation. It’s very easy to say you’re tired of political discussion when all of your problems are solved. I keep trying to think of it that way.
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