Greatness comes from fear. Fear can either shut us down and we go home, or we fight through it.
Taking time to sit back and watch and think about what you've seen is important. Traveling did a great deal to me. I found that when I travel and just sit in the corner and watch, a million ideas come to me.
I think the whole world is dying to hear someone say, 'I love you.' I think that if I can leave the legacy of love and passion in the world, then I think I've done my job in a world that's getting colder and colder by the day.
'Let the music play on' would be my legacy.
I find the greatest songs in the world come out of pain, and I don't like it! Here's what it does: It strips away all of your facade. It makes you so honest. It's cleansing.
Exactly when people are in turmoil is the time that the entertainment business has always been at its best. Because people don't want to be reminded every day that they are under siege, or that they're not having a great time of life.
Just when I think it couldn't get any bigger, 'Tuskegee' reaches a new level of success.
All artists are egotistical maniacs with inferiority complexes.
The best compliment that has ever been given to me was, I was at the airport one day and a guy came in and said, 'Lionel, my wife loves you, the kids love you, my mother-in-law loves you, the family loves you.'
Lionel Richie, love song, OK, thank you very much, good-bye. And all of a sudden I realized that, in my career, what has made my career has always been the surprises.
So much of my career has been about saying things the way people say them, using melodies not that I can sing but that the people can sing.
When I was growing up, music was music and there were no genres. We didn't look at it as country music. Popular music in Tuskegee was country music. So I didn't know it in categories. It was the radio.
I grew up with the Grand Ole Opry, Dottie West, Conway Twitty, Buck Owens... not realizing it was influencing me as much as it was.
By growing up in Alabama, I had a melting pot of the whole pie: R&B, gospel, country.
I just like people. I'll hold a conversation at a gas station. It's not about the fame and the fortune, I just like people.
I am a country boy and proud of it.
Growing up with country, R&B, gospel, and classical music from my grandmother and pop, Tuskegee was the perfect melting pot for my influences as a writer.
I travel around the world, experiencing every language, every religion... some places where there's just no reason to smile, because their lives are so difficult.
Country is bringing in a little rock element... a little '80s element. Melody is king now. But its just in the music, its not so much in the songwriting, which is still very basic to the storytelling aspect of it.
I always like to challenge myself. I never want to be put into a box.
