I've always been drawn to city skylines.
It is always weird to be in the studio working on Christmas music in June and July, so we decorated the entire studio, we really did. We brought out lights, fake trees and decorated the place to get in the Christmas spirit. You'd leave the studio, and it'd be 100 degrees out in Nashville, but nonetheless, a great experience.
I can still picture myself riding in the back of a Bronco to a field party after a rainstorm. My mama will kill me for saying this, but my first beer, I was 15 and I didn't know what to do with it. I thought you were supposed to chug it. So I just downed the whole thing in one gulp. All my friends were like, 'Duuuuuuude!
That's country music for you - bourbon and the Bible.
Mumford and Sons and Adele are both incredible artists and are great for popular music. There's a lot of club music with heavy beats, so to have that Mumford record and hear banjos being used is so cool.
You look at Michael McDonald and people like that; I think they just tried to write music that was true to themselves. That's our bottom line. Whatever people view us as, I think as long as we try to create good music that will win out in the end.
We have our roots in country, and that's our foundation, but we pull from a lot.
We don't get too nervous for too may things, but on television a few million people are sitting there watching. Definitely a lot more nerves.
We all love to sing, and when we sit down to write a song I think it kind of shows itself to us.
At the Grammys, you walk down the halls and everyone's got five security guards. You can't talk to anybody. You always feel out of place, like, 'Hey, the rednecks are in town!
To me the bottom line is: good music is good music.
When you're looking for a band name, I know it sounds weird, but everything you look at, everything you observe and read, you kind of think, 'Man, maybe that could be our band name.
