I would love to hear someone write a song like 'He Stopped Loving Her Today' rather than 'You're hot. I'm hot. We're in a truck.' It's just mind-numbing to me.
The devaluation of music and what it's now deemed to be worth is laughable to me. My single costs 99 cents. That's what a single cost in 1960. On my phone, I can get an app for 99 cents that makes fart noises - the same price as the thing I create and speak to the world with. Some would say the fart app is more important. It's an awkward time. Creative brains are being sorely mistreated.
Success is always temporary. When all is said and one, the only thing you'll have left is your character.
Music is like having a conversation. All musicians inspire each other, and they're all geared to play something that matters.
There ain't no future in the past.
I've always been more drawn to being normal than being famous.
A lot of people play to impress, but the really gifted ones play to move. That's the greatest point of ever doing this.
Through music you learn not to care about the color of someone's skin.
I don't chase what everyone else is looking for. Being creative is all about you.
I'm a musician, so for the most part I've always thought that the musicians were equally as inspiring to listen to - maybe more so, in some cases - in addition to the artists.
I don't want to impress somebody, I want to move somebody. Say the most with the least.
When you ask a songwriter, "What's your favorite song?" he goes, "The next one."
You learn a whole lot more about a person if they have bad breaks and all those kind of things.
I've always been the high harmony singer. It's never my job to know the verses! But I know the chorus of every song ever made.
I've always felt like every note of a song is of equal value.
I formally proposed. I'm a good Southern gentleman.
You can't define the ache that's in George's voice. It's just something inherently him. It doesn't need definition. It doesn't need clarification. It doesn't need a lot of things. You just sit back and appreciate it. It's just greatness.
When you lose people that are close to you it brings everything into focus, and the rest kind of gets put on the back burner.
The real beauty of it - key to my life was playing key chords on a banjo. For somebody else it may be a golf club that mom and dad put in their hands or a baseball or ballet lessons. Real gift to give to me and put it in writing.
The funny thing is, people's perceptions of what a song is about is usually wrong a majority of the time. But they're still going to read what they want to into it.
It would be fun to go back and see where all my songs stopped, because I think I'd have every number in the top 100. It never ceases to amaze me. It still hurts when one doesn't work, because you put your heart and soul into it.
I made records in the past that are as traditional as any other country records that have been made, but at the same time the records have a contemporary slant on it too.
It is not that I don't like contemporary country music because I do. I love it. I have recorded a lot and have had great success recording records that have not been very traditional country records.
When I look back, I don't remember the best of the best. I don't remember arena shows with 20,000 people. I remember funky little bar gigs where nobody shows up. The weirdest of the weird are what you retain.
I never aspired to be up front. When I was a kid, I didn't ever look in the mirror with a hairbrush going, "Hey, I'm Elvis!"
