I’ve been here 21 years, and I literally did walk up and down Music Row trying to break into the business. I felt very free to go into any publishing company.
There’s nothing like a good cheating song to make me want to run home to be with my wife.
Success breeds volume, and it’s just amazing how many young writers, artists, and musicians there are in town.
I am in a business that’s built on record sales and reputation and how your single is doing and where your song is on iTunes. But the kind of music that I do comes from my beliefs.
What God wants is to reveal himself more fully to us.
I’ve always been a rule-follower. Even when I was a kid, I tried to do everything by the book.
I would hate to be a new artist or writer in town today. But somehow the cream continues to rise. If there’s one who’s great, he just jumps out of the pack like you can’t believe.
There’s obviously always danger in making music or art for art’s sake. Even as Christians we can be guilty of that, being more about the art than the Artist who gave us this gift.
I believe God weeps over – over death. Jesus wept at the grave the Lazarus. In the Bible, Jesus weeps at death.
Cars are the reason we, you know, people live or die.
That’s one wonderful thing about country music – it shifts, ebbs, and flows stylistically, unlike pop music.
Country music is just country. It’s going to shift around a little bit, doing some different instrumentations, different production styles. But it will always come back to what you heard at the Opry. Nobody wants it to change.
Everything we’re singing about is true, and even when you take away all the glitz, it’s still true in the darkest, ugliest and most hopeless places.
I love Christmas music and there’s nothing like getting together with friends at Christmas time to celebrate with music the incredible reality of the Savior’s birth.
What I see is tellin me this world’s gone crazy, but, What is real says God’s still on His throne, What I need is to remember one thing, that the Lord of the gentle breeze is Lord of the rough and tumble, and he is the King of the jungle.
I want to live with that sense with the music I make, with the art I make, with the way I love my kids, with the way I am a father and a husband and a friend and a follower of Christ, I want to live with reckless abandonment to the truth of the Gospel.
I enjoy being on stage with other artists. I have a chance to watch and see people responding to the other artists songs. I get to see how people are affected by the music.
I did nothing to deserve God’s love; in fact, I was living as an orphan, without hope. Yet God chose to pursue a relationship with me, and through the death of his son Jesus, I was adopted into God’s family.
I believe very confidently in the truth of Scripture, where it says that there is no authority, no power given to man except as given by God.
I am prone to reshape and refashion things to try and please as many people as I can, to get as many nods or smiles out of as many people as possible.