So I didn’t have anything to do with picking the songs, but I got to musically take them in places I thought might be interesting, so it was a real neat collaboration among the three of us.

The real amazing thing about all of this is I think I’ve maintained the mentality of a musician throughout it all, which I’m proudest of. And I’m still playing on people’s records and singing on people’s records.

It really does take a lot of time to make records, to be in the studio and do all that stuff.

You learn a whole lot more about a person if they have bad breaks and all those kind of things.

I do not like being famous. I like being normal.

Yes, the companionship is amazing. You know, you can get that physical attraction that happens is great, but then there’s an awful lot of time and the rest of the day that you have to fill.

Well I think in all the thirty years I’ve been doing this now and being gone from home and all that stuff it’s really, it’s not about what I’ve achieved and if I’ve become a better player, or played better ten years ago than I do today.

The funny thing is, people’s perceptions of what a song is about is usually wrong a majority of the time. But they’re still going to read what they want to into it.

Whether it is successful or not is not the exercise for me. It is not up to me. It is out of my hands now. I am not going to in two years have hindsight and say I made a big mistake.

I can sit and analyze everything and beat myself up and say you don’t quite sing as good as you used to, you’re writing better songs maybe than you used to, but to me it’s just the journey.

I had just lost my dad and I remembered all the songs we used to go and hear at concerts, and the records around the house and sometimes we’d play together.

With The Key, it was, I had gone through a divorce and losing my father, and just kinda really reminiscing about how much I loved the traditional side of country music, so I made a record that was really traditional from start to finish.

I am responsible for me. I can kind of take care of what I need to do and should do what I like to do.

I formally proposed. I’m a good Southern gentleman.

I mean, look at her. Any idiot, you know, would quite taken with Amy.

It is not that I don’t like contemporary country music because I do. I love it. I have recorded a lot and have had great success recording records that have not been very traditional country records.

This is just strictly me wanting to make a record that is the real deal. It is all the stuff that I have learned and know that I remember. It’s what I perceive as country music is about.

When all is said and done the only thing you’ll have left is your character.

My last two records that I made were both quite pointed in one direction and I think I do my best stuff when it’s all over the map, when there’s a couple traditional things, a couple pretty rocking things.

So I didn’t have anything to do with picking the songs, but I got to musically take them in places I thought might be interesting, so it was a real neat collaboration among the three of us.

This record for the first time – feels like a record that really represents my whole entire life and instead of just a period of my life. And it is really kind of eye opening and it makes me feel really good to hear this record and hear all the years.

And from my place, and from the time that I went through my divorce, I also had my father pass away in the middle of all that. And it kind of made everything else just kind of like the back burner, you know.

I’ve always been more drawn to being normal than being famous.

Success is always temporary. When all is said and one, the only thing you’ll have left is your character.

But you know the thing that I thing oftentimes gets ignored and neglected is there was 10 or 12 years of life before I met Amy and before she met me, where you know, whatever happened was probably going to happen some day.

It is easy to react if everything is going great.

It is not fun singing about losing somebody like that, but at the same time it was easy to write because the memories were so real and vivid and so much a part of who I am.

Well, more than me saying to the rest of the country music industry there is not enough traditional country music – that is not necessarily the statement in truth. I think more so that I, me, missed it more than anything else.

The real beauty of it – key to my life was playing key chords on a banjo. For somebody else it may be a golf club that mom and dad put in their hands or a baseball or ballet lessons. Real gift to give to me and put it in writing.

I made records in the past that are as traditional as any other country records that have been made, but at the same time the records have a contemporary slant on it too.

I am not struggling. What I do, it is what I do.