A Quote by Chris Tomlin
My dad taught me to play the guitar. We grew up with country music. We had every Willie Nelson record (laughs). I was saved at a young age and had a great desire to follow God. I was really focused on that through my whole life, even as a kid and through high school.
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I grew up with rock and pop music from the 70s and 80s. I had to play guitar in school - it was a music college and we had to take instrument classes there - so I think guitar playing and guitar sounds have always been an influence.
I grew up with my parents always listening to rock music. My dad wanted me to play guitar, but I always had more of an ear for drums. He really wanted me to be a guitar player, like him.
I grew up always around music through my father - I would play in music studios with him as I was growing up - and my high school, Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music and Art and Performing Arts.
You never hear a country-western station saying 'We have old school artist Willie Nelson in the house.' They say 'We have the legendary Willie Nelson.'
My childhood was epitomized by my parents who were uneducated but had a doctorate in love. My dad pressed coats and through my mom and dad I learned about love, family and respecting people. They never went to high school but they had within them every element that makes a great American. They had pride and a great work ethic and they knew how to do things the right way.
I grew up with the Highwaymen, which was Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings and Kris Kristofferson. Mom and Dad rode rodeo, so country music was always in the house and the car. They threw in some Dolly Parton, too.
Somehow you can tell the difference when a song is written just to get on the radio and when what someone does is their whole life. That comes through in Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Willie Nelson. There is no separating their life from their music.
I think we have to go through everything we go through in our life, and I believe my purpose in life was to teach self-reliance. So I had the experience of relying on myself very early in life in order to have that knowing, because otherwise I would've just read about it. I think of it now as a great advantage that I had. It certainly taught me to rely upon myself at a very young age. And that's what I've been teaching since I was a little boy.
My dad was a journalist. One great trip we took was to Israel. We went there and drove through the whole country, and it was pretty incredible. We went to the Philippines and saw the beauty of that country but also what poverty really looks like. That had a profound effect on me.
For me, I guess music has always been the through-line. You know, I played guitar from a really young age, and my dad played, and my cousin gave me a drum kit when I was 13, and I played bass guitar, so, you know, it was definitely always in the house.
I played in orchestras all through high school and taught myself how to play guitar.
In fact, I lost my dad at a young age and had to put myself through school. I didn't have a lot of the advantages Donald Trump had but I had the most important ones you can get, which are loving parents who cared about me and helped me develop a sense of self. But it certainly wasn't Donald Trump's doing.
I think I had kind of an advantage. When I was growing up, my dad had just got out of jail and he had a great record collection. He had - it was all - these were the songs. So I heard a lot of these songs, like, my whole life, so for me it was easy. I already knew what I was going to sing.
It was a free-for-all with music when I was growing up. My mother was a huge music fanatic so I was listening to everything from country to heavy metal to Indigo Girls to Elton John. I guess when I was really young I didn't like Willie Nelson, and she obviously loved him. Now I do too, I'm so thankful to her for playing his music nonstop.
That competition grew through high school and you step outside more and it grew through college. Then you had regional style speak volumes through college. As you get older, and begin to travel and see more, that was the progression of style for me.
I always managed to get in trouble, like every kid. But I had to learn a lot of hard lessons on my own, without parents who would nurture me and guard me through that part of life, at a very young age.
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