Who's not a fan of Don Williams? He's the gentle giant.
I didn't have any expectations of what my family life would end up being like. But I've been very blessed in my life to have a wife who loves me and supports me and is able to be in my band and travel with me.
I love Tennessee, but they don't have the pine trees and the sandy soil and the black water that I grew up around.
I was trying to learn how to deal with the freedom that I had away from home for the first time. 'Long Black Train,' the song and the album, are very special to me. It was just one of those things that I felt like God gave to me for a purpose, and I've been out here promoting that purpose.
You have to make a lot of sacrifices, and the main thing you have to sacrifice is your privacy. It's funny because when I was growing up, my daddy was and still is an insurance agent in our home town. He couldn't go anywhere without somebody recognizing him or needing something from him.
You hear about quality time a lot but I really think that quantity time with a person is really what strengthens a relationship. That's when you really get to know somebody. You get to know their strengths and their weaknesses and that brings you closer. That's what 'Time Is Love' is all about.
When you get married and have children, and you start having hits and success and your business starts growing, there's less and less time for songwriting.
Not only am I trying to be a daddy, but also a friend, not be the old fogey thats slowing everybody else down... not for a while, at least.
I love my boys. I love watching them growing up. I love seeing them develop, and I'm always looking forward to seeing what they're going to become and what they're going to be interested in later in life.
My manager came up with the idea of taking a Pro Tool rig out on the road to record every night and I thought it was a great idea. I felt like it would be good to record over a certain period of time and then take the best performances of that collection of recordings. It appealed to me that it wasn't going to be from just one location.
There were only 75 people in my graduating class at the school I attended in Hannah, S.C. It was a small school and that translated into not a lot of opportunities when it came to music. We had academic and sports programs but we never had a consistent music program. We would have a band one year, and a chorus one year, but nothing ever lasted.
What I did to celebrate was I went home to my 535-square-foot apartment by myself and ate supper by myself. That was how I celebrated getting a record deal.
I grew up going to a real small missionary baptist church. We would sing a lot of the old standards... the hymns and everything. Those songs are still my favorite and are pretty timeless.
The coolest gift I've ever gotten from a fan was from the Franklin Mint. It was a knife, and it had a picture of General Wade Hampton, who my oldest son is named after. It's a collector's item and came with a case and a stand and everything.
I'm definitely not going to go and sing a song that condones certain things.
I'm not much of a water skier, my legs are too skinny for that, so I just try to tube and have fun, just ride.
My first full year of touring, I did 300 days on the road. That was not including the travel time or publicity or anything else - that was just dates. I was home probably less than 50 days that year.
I remember those days right after I graduated from college. All I had to do was wake up in the morning and think about writing songs. It's not like that anymore, needless to say.
I'm always showing pictures off. I have to be careful who I show them to because of who I am, obviously, but I'm a proud father.
A No. 1 record is hard to come by.
I haven't always been the guy that walks into a room and automatically the attention is on me. I'm normally the guy that stands off in the corner.
'All Over Me' is a song that I really got fired up the first time I heard it: it just really moved and it really had a lot of energy.
My granddaddy on my momma's side, he was a romantic. He loved love songs. Every Valentine's Day, I remember him buying a red carnation for my grandmomma, my momma and my sister. That was something you could count on every year.
'Firecracker' was such a fun song to write and to perform.
I don't ever land on an album title until I know exactly what's going on the record, because you never know until it's all said and done.
