It's was all the internet. I started writing songs in high school, right about the time of the onset of Napster. I went to college in Dallas, and when I'd get back from class I'd have fans emailing me from different areas of the country asking when the album was going to be out and when I was going on tour. It was crazy, because I didn't even consider myself a professional musician.
It definitely feels like I'm sort of reaching people through social media in the right kind of way. I feel like I've been late to the game with the whole Facebook/Twitter thing, because I always thought it was cheap. But, when I started really using it and trying to be myself when using it, which is the hardest thing. I feel like a lot of people are really responding to that.
I think that with albums these days, as long as you are moving forward and not trying to re-create things and looking back, albums are like living breathing things. They change, they evolve and it's this big thing that you are trying to get out to people. To me, whatever you can do to get it out there, do that.
When you are on a major record label, you're just forced to think big. You are forced to think about things like "how many radio spins did we get this week?" or "how many albums did we sell across the country. Being independent, you are just focused on the city that you are playing in tonight. How many people can I meet and become friends with tonight. That's one of the great things about being an independent artist.
Everything that has happened to me in a good way, I never thought in a million years those things would happen. Now that I have achieved those things, there's kind of always another mountain to climb.
The exciting part about sitting down and writing songs, playing shows, or being a musician in general is that you never know where those songs and that music is going to take you. There's such a cool feeling about that the phone could ring tomorrow and someone could say "he guess what? your song..." That really is cool.
It is amazing when you try and write songs without an instrument. It kind of forces the melody to be honed it. It has to be good. A lot of what I think are my best songs were made without an instrument.
