I was in Nashville and I was having just the most amazing time there, discovering who I was as an artist because that is such a music city. Everyone there is so friendly and inspiring and down to jam.
Nashville has a great creative atmosphere. It's a small, close-knit music community that you can't find anywhere else.
I think country music is a champion of women. That stuff coming out of Nashville now wants to see a woman looking good in the kitchen whipping up some biscuits.
Sometimes I have parties at my house in Nashville and it's clothing-optional, and we just body-paint each other and run around, and I have a giant bed. I'm very much in touch with that side of myself.
My contract with mercury PolyGram Nashville was about to expire. And I never had really been happy. The company, the record company, just didn't put any promotion behind me. I think one album, maybe the last one I did, they pressed 500 copies. And I was just disgusted with it. And about that time that I got to feeling that way, Lou Robin, my manager, came to me and talked to me about a man called Rick Rubin that he had been talking to that wanted me to sign with his record company.
I don't know if Nashville will ever be ousted as the Music City. But I also think that here, over the last few years, Georgia has definitely kind of risen to the top as far as the crop of young artists coming out of this area that are kind of making waves, you know?
I see interracial couples all the time in Nashville. I'm a Jew in Nashville. I'm a gay person in Nashville. It's a non-issue in most of the time. That's a huge leap forward.
L.A. was never me. Nashville is my home.
I was so bad with the food and alcohol in Nashville. If you saw me naked compared to what I looked like when I did Iron Man 2, when I was exercising every day - I'll get it back together, but I've never eaten so much fried food and white flour in my life, ever.
I remember in the '80s, Randy Travis was my guy. He's the reason I moved to Nashville, and I just loved him. But at some point when he was winning everything, you find yourself pulling for other people.
I had never heard much about Nashville before coming out here, and that's why it's so surprising, because I'm the biggest enthusiast on the city of Nashville now. I'm looking for a place out here to live.
There was a period of time when I first moved to Nashville, like the first couple of years, that I was just simply lost. I didn't know who I was; I didn't know really what I was doing here. I was meant to be a singer, but I just felt lost. That's when I went on the search for my birth family.
When I was in Nashville, Tennessee in 1970 with Derek and the Dominoes, I went into this shop and they had a rack of Strats and Teles - all going for $100.00 each. I bought a handfull and made Blackie out of the body from one, the neck from another, and so on
I think, to be honest, sort of emanated from the initial work of somebody else instead of SCLC. If you take Albany; I don't know whether you recall how Albany got started. There were two little guys who went up there first. One was Cordell Hull who was then in his teens - not Cordell Hull - Cordell Reagan, who came out of the Nashville movement, and Charles Sherrod, who came out of the Richmond, Virginia, movement.
I was writing for a publishing company in this old building right next to the RCA Victor Studio in Nashville. We were on the top floor, and Combine Music was on the bottom floor. I was friends with all those guys.
Real folk music long ago went to Nashville and left no known survivors.
Over the years I've had more and more of an association with Nashville.
I think all of us would agree that a lot of Christian radio sounds the same. A lot of music that comes out of Nashville kind of has a little bit of the same vibe. Because I don't live in Nashville, I surround myself with a culture and an influence that's outside that bubble. So when the church hears it, it's refreshing, and when the world hears it, it sounds like something they want to listen to.
There's been a lot of talk about Jack White wanting to work with me, and I've always admired him, and of course, he lives in Nashville, too.
If actors are making a little film with me at 2am in Nashville, they're not doing it to get paid. They're doing it because there's something special about the characters, which helps the film become more interesting.
I love Nashville, and I love the South, but on a professional level, I had started feeling smothered by the Nashville way of doing things.
I fell in love with Nashville. I got lots of work.
The first time I go out to Nashville, ever (at this point I had only heard the rumors about what it's like) I had three writing sessions set up. The first two canceled on me. I was kind of pissed off at that point. So I just went back to my hotel room and started writing. And even though I've been to L.A. and experienced a lot of things, at the end of the day I just start to feel like I'm playing acoustically at the first bar I ever played at.
My album was recorded in Nashville. It used to be all about "We're from Texas, forget Nashville," well you'll never hear me say that. Nashville isn't bad as long as you're true to yourself.
I don't know that we're beating anyone at their own game. I just think that we tried to include a lot of Nashville entities from the very beginning, just to see if that would work. We were trying to take my music to a different level and some people wanted me to change my style and my image, obviously that's not going to happen so we simply thanked those people for their time.
