If you're true to yourself, it doesn't matter where you record your music or where you say you're from. I am an artist from Texas, proud to be from Texas, but I play my own kind of music, my brand of country music.
Little white lies are part of everyday life. If youre in court being charged with a felony, youre probably going to be tempted to lie. Or if your girlfriend asks you if the sweater she is wearing makes her look fat; youre going to lie because you love that person. There are different reasons and justifications to lie; its human nature.
If you go down to Texas, people are real proud about and they rep Texas.
I have never known anyone from Texas, no matter how far they go or what they do, who isn't proud of being from Texas.
Texas Governor Rick Perry distanced himself from George W. Bush by saying, 'I went to Texas A&M. He went to Yale.' In other words, his idea of instilling confidence is by saying, 'Don't worry. I'm not as smart as George W. Bush.'
A lot of my family is from Texas, stuff like that, so I was always in Texas, and when you grow up in Texas, around Texas, you want to go to the biggest Texas school, and UT was that.
I was always proud about being from Texas and, you know, maybe that was part of fearlessness. I love the fact that Texas is so big, but you don't feel small because of that.
If youre going to spend two or three years of your life working on something, youve got to be making the kind of movie that discusses and influences the culture and is engaged in the world youre living in.
The Bushes were certainly part of Texas in their mind, but they didn't have the kind of political flavor that you normally find in Texas politicians. It's just Texas is such a unique place to itself that politically, at least so far, they haven't found anybody to play nationally.
If youre a singer, you do concerts, and you get that interaction with fans and see what cities in what part of the world come out to see you. When youre on television, youre removed from that.
There are so many steps you have to go through to reach a high level, so youre kind of building your own, I would say, mountain. You have to go piece by piece by piece. When youre young and really ambitious, you want to jump right up. It kind of teaches you a lesson, I would say.
Technique is the basis of every pursuit. If youre a sportsman or youre a singer or a swimmer, well that comes under sport but you have to develop a basic technique to know what youre doing at any given time.
Theres a lot to be said for doing what youre not supposed to do, and the rewards of doing what youre supposed to do are more subtle and take longer to become apparent, which maybe makes it less attractive. But your life is the blueprint you make after the building is built.
My grandfather always told me, You know youre American first, but youre a Greek-American, which makes you a better American. It sounds sort of old-world and very sweet, but what he meant was that you should embrace those things that are most special and different about you.
The most important thing you can do as a performer is to be yourself, or be an onstage version of yourself. If youre not being true to yourself, and somebody likes that other version of you, youre kind of stuck.