My favorite thing is to go out in the arenas, like, an hour before doors, and run the concourse. And you get that anticipation. You smell the popcorn. You see the people tapping the kegs. And nobody is in there yet but you, but you feel it. It's my favorite thing on tour.
I went to Appalachian State University, which was very bluegrass- and folk-oriented.
My favorite artists are the ones that I can take their eight or ten albums, and I can see the arc of their life.
I'm not a big TV guy, but I love either 'Auction Hunters' or those repo shows on truTV. It's really just glorified 'Jerry Springer' is all it is. Every now and then, it's just mindless entertainment. We'll be on the bus, and we'll laugh at it. Those are my guilty pleasures.
The stigma with country is it's not cool. That's wrong. Country is very cool. I look at award shows, I look at how country is represented. Country is represented with an asterisk. We have to perform collaborations. We have to perform a tribute. We can't perform by ourselves.
There's a roots nature to Appalachia - the origins of folk and bluegrass. I know guys there who are some of the best players I've ever heard but are playing on their porch tonight because they've never chased success. There's simplicity to how they live and what they care about.
I went to my dad when I was 17 and said, 'I want to be a country music star.' Which every dad loves to hear. And he said, 'I want you to go to college.' So we had a discussion. And I'm pretty stubborn. I'm a lot like him. And he said, 'If you go to college and graduate, I'll pay your first six months of rent in Nashville.' So he bribed me.
Coming up in bars and clubs, I would play anything that had a $20 bill attached to it. I did 'Like a Virgin' in a bar one time for a hundred bucks.
With bullying and all the stuff going on, words are very important. Words can be more hurtful than anything physically. I got little kids, and it's common sense when you're raising them that the main thing is how you talk to people, and how you treat people. Sometimes I think the world forgets that as we get older.
To me, the most powerful people in this country, politically, are mayors. If you took all the mayors of the 25 biggest cities and you got them together, you could do more on that level than you ever could through the bureaucracy in Washington.
I grew up in North Carolina, and they have a soft drink called Sun Drop. I love the diet version of it. It's the greatest thing on the face of the earth. I always have it in my fridge - bus fridge and home fridge.
I have a huge chip on my shoulder.
I don't use the big video screens that a lot of other artists use because personally, I think it's kind of a crutch. I think sometimes it's like watching television as opposed to really getting involved with what is happening onstage and the people in your section.
Music's cyclical. There's always that next generation that always comes along.
I would be on the 'anti-reality' show. I can't stand reality TV. I can tell you one that I absolutely would not be on, and that's 'Dancing With the Stars.' If you ever see me on that show, just please understand my family is starving to death, and things are really bad in the Church household.
You're not gonna write a hundred songs and have a hundred entirely different ideas. It's a matter of finding the ones that are the freshest and most unique.
The Wall Street Dow Jones up and down thing that's moving when the stock market's open? That thing freaks me out. It's up, it's down, it's just maddening to me. I guess I'm such a super-focused kind of person that I get distracted really easy. I'll watch that thing, and it's like I'm losing money, I'm getting money. It's just crazy.
I grew up listening to The Band. I love Lowell George. I love Little Feat, and I was listening to some Springsteen, some of the deep album cuts. I just like the looseness of that kind of music. It all feels like they did it in one take. They let whatever happened happen. If it felt good, they kept it.
Country has become too homogenized and too commercial. It has lost what makes it special. It's great that it's popular, but then it starts to become watered down.
I've always believed that you put everything into making the best record you can make, regardless of how you release it and regardless of the press and the hype - that the music wins.
