All I'm really interested in musically is trying to make concept albums. Serving a larger sum than the parts.
I just can't sit down and write three verses and a chorus and a bridge anymore. It just don't find it inspiring.
I knew I wanted to make a concept record in song-cycle form, like my favorite Marvin Gaye records where everything just continuously flows.
I'm grateful to all the non-risk-takers.
I'm just gonna write a record for my kid, and if people hate it, it doesn't matter.
I didn't graduate from college, so I might as well be on Atlantic Records, right?
I knew I loved playing bluegrass, so I'd end up down there on Sunday nights at the bluegrass jam.
I just have to do what it is going to make me happy, first and foremost - what is honest and what is sincere. Anybody that listens will hopefully connect with that.
Let's just cut a live record with three microphones in four days and talk about lizards and aliens. If I had taken that idea to even an independent label, I don't see a label out there that would've said, 'Oh yeah, that sounds great. We know how to market this.'
Willie Nelson, Marty Robbins, Merle Haggard and Keith Whitley - guys like that were huge influences.
It's hard enough to sit at a table and talk to most people as it is. But we can go to some town, and there's 300 people we've never met before, and by the third song, we're connecting with everyone in that room.
I've been reading about the idea of cyclical lives - it matches up to the idea of string theory and a multiverse. So I wanted to write a record about that instead of another song about broken hearts and drinking.
You spend all this time reading or thinking or praying or searching or exploring.Maybe there's an Omega Point of love.
I tried to make a honky-tonk country record - rough-hewn, cut fast, and all analog - like I wasn't hearing anymore.
My wife thinks I'm crazy.
Back home, playing music is never anything you imagine you can do for a living. It's what you do after work.
Country music especially can get very formulaic - you know, you have to have your verses and a bridge and a chorus, and a lot of the songs are written as just plain and simple poetry on the road.
Anything that I'm naturally curious about, I get really into. Maybe it's O.C.D. I get really consumed by something until I absorb it, then I'm done with it.
I grew up listening to everything. I was in rock n' roll bands and punk bands, and I loved bluegrass and country music, too. Then, when I moved to Nashville, I put out a very traditional country record because that's just what you do. I had a bunch of very traditional country songs. Next thing you know, you're a country singer.
I just don't see myself as a songwriter or a country singer or any of those things anymore. It's more trying to express ideas and emotional textures.
