I'm really annoyed by the wave of country music that's just a list of stuff. It almost sounds like L.A. people writing country music, because it's just a list of stuff: 'My pickup truck and my cowboy boots and my Levi's jeans and my girlfriend with the short shorts.' It's so boring!
I'm thrilled that country music fans like my stuff, but so do a lot of people outside of country music, people who just love music. My goal is more to reach music lovers than to appeal to a genre. I love country music, and I'm proud to represent it, but I don't obsess over it as a category.
Only in country music can you compare an old pickup truck and an old guitar to your wife and turn it into a love song... Thank God for country music.
When I was really young, I had an afro and wore pressed jeans and argyle sweaters. In my teens, I moved on to ripped Levi's jeans, white T-shirts, and cowboy boots.
All that stuff about heavy metal and hard rock, I don't subscribe to any of that. It's all just music. I mean, the heavy metal from the Seventies sounds nothing like the stuff from the Eighties, and that sounds nothing like the stuff from the Nineties. Who's to say what is and isn't a certain type of music?
All that stuff about heavy metal and hard rock, I don't subscribe to any of that. It's all just music. I mean, the heavy metal from the '70s sounds nothing like the stuff from the '80s, and that sounds nothing like the stuff from the '90s. Who's to say what is and isn't a certain type of music?
Guys like Future and me, we help create and shape the sound of music - not just Atlanta music, but music all over. If you really pay attention to the music being made, a lot of that is very heavily influenced by the stuff that we created. I listen to so many songs that's like, 'Damn, this sounds like my music!'
The thing about Nashville is, it's not just country music...There's rock & roll, there's every kind of music. It's just a music town...There's so much fun stuff to get in to.
If I'm playing country, I gotta have my country hat and my cowboy boots. I gotta have a voice, and the third thing, I gotta have I guess a little music to keep me in the right mind, a little pre-show something to get ya going. Lots of AC/DC, or I'll sit on youtube and find all kinds of stuff before we take the stage to get pumped up.
Country music turns the stuff we say every day into a soundtrack...taking an ordinary working man like me into that rough, happy country of longnecks and short tales.
I love black leggings with cowboy (I mean cowgirl!) boots, and other-slightly less trendy-things like my boys' Wrangler jeans and my husband's worn deerskin work gloves. I love most things country, because country, to me, is home.
I think I, like most people, enjoy a wide variety of music. Yeah, I like some country stuff - old country stuff. I might not enjoy Billy Ray Cyrus or anything. But, you know, Patsy Cline, Willie Nelson, early Johnny Cash - absolutely.
It never mattered to me that people in school didn't think that country music was cool, and they made fun of me for it - though it did matter to me that I was not wearing the clothes that everybody was wearing at that moment. But at some point, I was just like, 'I like wearing sundresses and cowboy boots.'
I do like people who are popular across the years and stuff like that, but I'm not a big pop music fan. I don't listen to the radio unless it's KCRW, like Booka Shade. Yeah, like weird music is what I'm really into right now. But I like anything really. There's just so much. I buy new music almost every day, so there's so much coming in that I don't even have time to listen to something more that twice.
I think I get really into comfort music: '60s stuff, '50s stuff like Frankie Avalon. I love it - such simple songs, but so well written. That, and old French pop. I love that, because I don't speak French. It's all just pop music! But I love it because it just makes me focus on the melodies.
If you got in my truck, you were listening to country music, and that's the way it was for a long time. I'm a little more open to other sources of music now, a lot more. But for the formative years, I was just very into country.
I put Liam at the top of the list, the male actor list, because I had just seen Schindler's List again and Michael Collins, and I was just like, 'God, what an incredible actor.'