Pastoral Resources

Downloading songs is not good.

My songs are more arrangements than they are songs.

To hell with them. When history is written they will be the sons of bitches - not I.

It's so funny because I listen to songs that I recorded that I didn't really know anything about at the time. Later on I'm starting to feel the songs. Sing them first, feel them later.

My son is now an 'entrepreneur.' That's what you're called when you don't have a job.

Greatest hits is easy because one has nothing to do - except that we both, Roger and I, felt that new songs should be there because I've been away for awhile.

I play chess badly and I've been beaten by my 10-year old son.

It was just like a dream. I could have ended up with an album that's not all that different from anything else coming out of Nashville. Mutt made the difference. He took these songs, my attitude, my creativity, and colored them in a way that is unique.

I just try to get inside the song and imagine what comes next.

A good country song takes a page out of somebody's life and puts it to music.

I go through a thousand songs to find ten for a new record.

If you take all that I've learned from Joe and all that Joe has learned from me, and you throw all that into a song, not only are you using the gifts that God gave you, but also all the experiences you've had.

Regard your soldiers as your children, and they will follow you into the deepest valleys; look on them as your own beloved sons, and they will stand by you even unto death.

The most common trait of all primitive peoples is a reverence for the life-giving earth, and the Native American shared this elemental ethic: The land was alive to his loving touch, and he, its son, was brother to all creatures.

Some people try and tell you what the songs are about and it bores me to death.

My son had his eighth birthday recently and we had a chance to borrow the film and show it to all of his friends that was at his birthday party and they loved it. I was a little nervous. I said they might not even like it, and say his daddy's movie is wack, but they loved it.

I haven't done a lot of things in my career that my kids can watch, because they are 8, 6 and 3, and they are pretty young; so given the concepts that the film was about a superhero, it was a black superhero, and it was a father and son type partnership.

It can get a little costly if you try and leave it until then to write songs. But you're writing all the time. You're collecting songs. I've had songs that have been collected over a two-year period for my next record.

It's not the case of turning in a bunch of songs and recording the next month. I think you're looking for songs all year long and you're writing all year long.

So I concentrated on the rhythmic side of things, and therefore left a lot of holes. I didn't want to use big pad chords everywhere. All of the songs are built up of small melodies and counter melodies all played very rhythmically.