It's something that Cory Morrow said to me a long time ago - "Don't ever forget why Nashville is Nashville. The Opry is there for a reason. Country music lives there. Don't be bitter. And don't ever treat Texas or Nashville like either one isn't important."
My publishing deal is out of Nashville, my management is split between Nashville and Texas, but we are also getting to play eight other states as well as Canada and Europe this year. I don't want to pigeon-hole myself. When people ask me if I'm Texas or Nashville, I tell them I am just Cody Johnson.
Now that I'm in 'Nashville,' the thing that I'm loving the most is co-writing. You walk into the room and you shake hands with someone you've never met before and you walk out four hours later and you've got this thing... sharing ideas and everything, it's almost magical, like a miracle.
I realize I was more of a curiosity to the older Nashville artists than the new ones.
I love chocolate, and I love to shop - just give me a good boutique. I like mall scenarios, too, because there's more right there at hand. I think Nashville could use some better shopping!
One of the reasons I wanted to do a show about Nashville in Nashville was because when I lived here, the hardest thing to go out and hear was country music. Country was taking place inside the studio and it was an export.
I have this friend who has a theory that lots of towns have energies. And, for instance, certain places in Alabama have bad ones because they were built on reservations or built on cemeteries or something. But Nashville has a really gravitational, magnetic pull.
Im Sorry was one of the first songs to come out of Nashville using strings.
In Nashville, as in every other city, there's no substitute for hard work.
I think of Nashville as a very natural place. We're easy going, we are ourselves. There isn't a lot of preening or trying to impress. So it's an easy place to just be and that is a good state from which to write.
Most records, you build from the drums and bass up. This one, we started with the vocals in Nashville and recorded them live with just the guitars and tried to make that complete and lovely-sounding without any adornment at all. I really wanted to get something with the vocal that I've never gotten before Armchair Apocrypha.
