What we really need to be open to is diversity itself, especially in a business environment. What you want is a plethora of ideas; you want people with different life experience, people with different work experience, people from different cultures to bring something to the table that you otherwise based on your own coming up, you yourself wouldn't have thought of.
I believe that most people aren't that different from one another. Although we might appear to be different on the surface, I think ultimately we all go through the same struggles.
There are a lot of people who talk about a formula for being able to start a fan base. But for me, it's been about songs and just being hard on myself as a writer, feeling like there is a purpose to it all.
I write very personal songs. Subject matter is usually derived from some internal struggle that I am having.
I don't worry so much about whether people are buying my music or getting it for free.
The most important thing is writing songs that resonate and giving people a chance to listen to them.
I find that it is useless to worry about things I can't control and I can't control how many people come out tonight. All I can do is focus on writing the best songs I can write and performing the best I can perform.
I just try to stay honest with myself and in doing that I feel like the songs are going to resonate.
When I deal with my struggles in my songs, I feel like most people are going to identify with my struggles because they are essentially dealing with the same things.
In many ways my writing is like therapy. It is my way of dealing with things.
When I think about my career and how it all started, it really started with me getting to a point where I understood how to write songs that resonated with people.
I think people just want to hear good songs and I just want to keep getting better as a writer so that I can deliver good songs.
I believe that people want to hear good songs and they want to be moved.
Athens, much like Austin, is a difficult music scene. There are so many musicians there that it is hard to get gigs and hard for people to take you seriously.
I get asked if I mind when someone burns my music. I'm just flattered that people want to.
