When I started playing music it was around Austin and the Hill Country area in Texas and there were always campfires and picking circles and I loved being a part of that.
Texas people are really strong in their roots. I started writing and playing guitar at 17. I've always loved music, and my dad is a singer-songwriter.
Here in Austin, Texas, we live in sort of rolling hill country. And I get on my mountain bike, just cruise the hills, get on the trails.
I have always loved the Bay Area. I spent a lot of time in the Bay Area. I started my career there. That's a huge part of the excitement for me.
I started learning my lessons in Abbot Texas, where I was born in 1933. My sister Bobbie and I were raised by our grandparents [...] We never had enough money, and Bobbie and I started working at an early age to help the family get by. That hard work included picking cotton. [...] Picking cotton is hard and painful work, and the most lasting lesson I learned in the fields was that I didn't want to spend my life picking cotton.
I had always loved music. I grew up listening to classic country, Waylon Jennings, Merle Haggard. My dad loved Vern Gosdin and Keith Whitley. So I kept going to class and started getting totally into playing guitar and teaching myself these songs.
I started playing music when I was around 10. I always wanted to be in a band, so I started out by playing drums.
Every time we do anything, Austin's the No. 1 place of all that supports it. Austin is our biggest philanthropic helper, even for things that have nothing to do with Austin or Texas.
My father loved music. He loved Motown and R&B, and my mother loved Journey and Fleetwood Mac, so they were always listening to it and playing it.
In terms of exploring an identity in the country music world, what I realized very quickly was that there are people who have been performing country music since they were kids. It's very much a part of who they are; very much that jazz and blues are a part of who I am, because I grew up listening to and playing that kind of music.
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.
When I started working in film, I loved photography, I loved the image, I loved telling the story within a frame, but as I started playing around with film and video, it was like, 'Oh my god.' You just have so much more to play with.
I used to be like "Why are we doing a remake? What are remakes being done for?" But then, we do that all the time in the theater. Retelling stories is what we've done since we were sitting around campfires. It's a part of the human spirit. It doesn't have to be negative to creativity. It can be completely opposite.
I grew up in a house that was always happy, and my family was always music, music. I started playing percussion very young, because I had some uncles who were musicians and all my aunts were singers.
I know my dad would have loved me to have played rugby. He was a No. 8. I started off playing centre and ended up playing at the back of the scrum, No. 8 as well, just picking it up and running with it.
When the F-16 first was rolled out, there were many problems in the development. There were cost issues, and it ended up being one of the best planes the military has ever seen and kept this country protected and kept many jobs in the North Texas area.
It wasn't professional, but it was a few levels below the top level. I loved playing football, but my passion was always music. It didn't become a possibility to me until I started playing songs I thought were good. I think it happened during my third song. The dream to become a musician appeared in my heart, and that happened about 2010.