It's a long road, so we are just trying to stay focused and grounded and keep moving forward. I'll take it, though.
I worked for Union Pacific. I started out as a conductor at an intermodal switching facility outside of Salt Lake City. We'd pull in trains from all over the country, break them apart, consolidate the freight, and build other trains. It was great until I screwed up and took a management position. Then it became no fun very quickly.
My paternal grandfather, when he was in the army in World War II - he was over in the South Pacific, and he thought he was gonna die. And he wrote a letter to my grandmother and their newborn son, thinking he wasn't gonna come home.
I saw Dolly Parton play at the Glastonbury Festival to about 120,000 people. It was an ocean of human beings. I was a mile away from the stage, and I swear to God, I could feel her energy.
I used to play a lot of electric guitar. I don't really consider myself a guitar player anymore. Then I got really into how the pickups work. And winding and de-winding Telecaster pickups. And then building Telecasters. And I became more fascinated with making them than I was with actually playing them. So it's a slippery slope.
I wanted to make an album that takes a journey through all my favorite periods in music and then culminates in something that will most likely end my career.
The only way I'm going to support my family is to tour. I love playing, don't get me wrong. That 90 minutes every night, that's free. We get paid to travel. But every night, I have to get myself locked in. There are a thousand people that don't want to be disappointed, because they have a lot of expectations.
I lived in Japan when I was younger for about two years. I spent my time equally between religiously studying Aikido in Shinjuku by day and hard partying in Shibuya and Roppongi by night.
There's a lot going on in country music, with indie-label hipsters and underground bloggers arguing their interpretations of what country is, and pop-country stars defending themselves. That deserves to be poked fun at.
Both my grandfathers and my mother's brother were musicians.
The art is what can't be put on a timeline. You can't say, 'Well, I'm going to make a record in May because that's when the producer has a window.' So just recording and getting things out is paramount for me.