The purpose of it all is love.

Wherever is your heart I call home.

I love fishing, any kind of fishing.

But I'm warning you, we're growing up.

The mole can't live in your dollhouse.

I'm really tough. It's a state of mind.

I was born when I met you, now I'm dying to forget you

Privilege and complacency paralyze me with fear sometimes.

I feel like the kindest thing that I do to my voice is sing.

Bear the burdens of others, but don't put them in your pocket too.

You can dance in a hurricane, but only if you're standing in the eye.

There is a creator and a redeemer, and the purpose of it all is love.

Sometimes seeming happy can be self-destructive even when you're sane.

The hardest thing about being on the road is not being with my animals.

Coffee, whiskey, and fishing poles. That’s really all you need in life.

The oppression of women is the single most corrosive and urgent problem of our time.

Singing is a form of meditation... apparently the only one that I have command over.

Cousins are forever and forever are cousins they stand by your side for you no matter what.

My advice to new artists is to embrace a broader concept of timelessness than vintage or retro.

You can't change people, but most importantly, unless you're their momma, you don't even know what's best for them.

Every city has a town outside with a lake. I pull out my fishing pole and fish. I've been doing that for a long time.

My mother's a singer and my mother's father is a singer, and everyone on both sides are all country-western bluegrass musicians.

All of these lines across my face, tell you the story of who I am. So many stories of where I've been and how I got to where I am.

I'm not sure I'll ever be famous by anyone's definition. I can only hope to be allowed by the audience to continue my life's work.

The first thing I think of when I think about coming to Las Vegas and playing is always Elvis; its always the first thing on my mind.

Colorado is an oasis, an otherworldly mountain place. I've played so many shows in Colorado that I think I'm the Colorado house band.

People sing each other's songs and they cultivate standards. That's the reason why we have folk music and folk stories. History is told through song.

In life, I'm most inspired by entertaining people and driven by the desire to do it by such a powerful force that I think it influences everything I do.

I tend to feel really protective of songs, and if they aren't sitting well in a record, I'll pull them tight to my chest until I feel it's a better time.

I hope that somewhere in Small Town, U.S.A., a 15-year-old kid looks to me as a role model the way I looked at the Indigo Girls and Elton John as role models.

I believe that writing for me is in a way like wisdom; in that as soon as you feel like you've got it figured out you stop growing and maybe even lose something.

'Hallelujah' is going to be a standard that our grandkids, our great-great grandkids will learn to sing in church. It's one of those really, really special songs.

Even before I had a daughter, I was passionate about global women's issues, but now that she's here, I'm even more inspired to leave a better world for Evangeline.

People that could yodel always fascinated me. People that could sing loud always fascinated me. So I started trying to mimic at a really young age: 6, 7 years old.

I have vocal trouble from time to time associated with sleep or wine! Or from sleeping in a bunk the size of a coffin and breathing in bus air conditioning all day.

My songwriting is so influenced by orchestrated music, dramatic, super glam rock-y stuff. Two of my biggest influences in songwriting were Elton John and Freddie Mercury.

But now, with the last two years of touring and being on the road, I've learned that a live show should never sound like a record; a record should sound like a live show.

When I turned 30, I started to feel all those miles. At times, you want to turn the faucet off a bit, but I never want to stop traveling. That's what it's all about - taking the music to the people.

It's impossible to just come up with one thing that I could say to the world. That's why I've spent my life in the pursuit of the opportunity to sing to it. Summing it up goes against what fuels me.

I'd love to claim the title of 'songwriter' or 'intellectual,' but the truth is that anything that I ever learned how to do in conjunction with music was purely so that I would have a platform to sing from.

I feel like a lot of the singer-songwriters in my genre and in my generation have gotten more and more snooty about covering other people's songs. They believe that creativity is the intersect of expression.

I've read and heard that some of the most inspiring vocal interpreters adhere habitually to one rule: Always think the lyrics as you're singing them, so that the sentiment is always appropriate and heartfelt.

Privilege and complacency paralyze me with fear sometimes. But the less vulnerable we are because of privilege, the country we're born in, or the security we enjoy, the more vulnerable our souls are to apathy.

My wife even thinks our next album should be recorded in our house, and we should move all the furniture out to the garage. I'm not sure how many spouses would be supportive of that, much less come up with the idea.

I'm not so arrogant to consider mine the only legitimate art form. I can't in one breath make a fuss about someone compartmentalizing music into genre and then in the next accuse advertising and short film of not being art.

I didn't get bullied any more than anybody else. I think I got bullied more for being poor than being gay. But no more than any other kid. And I'm sure that I did my fair share of picking on other kids, too. We're all humans.

Writing is sort of putting a puzzle together halfway. Then, performing it has always been the completion of it. Once that happens, I'm feeling verbally communal with other people. It's out there and I feel so much better about it.

When I started out, I was definitely writing about experiences that I hadn't had yet. The songs were just based on my influences, songwriters that had written songs before me and that were more experienced and 20, 30 years older than me.

I grew up in a single-wide, three-bedroom mobile home with my family. And now I see them, like, half a dozen times a year. Figuring out how to come home and talk to them again and feel like myself has probably been the greatest challenge.

I tend to support and get behind issues instead of candidates, because of the whole 'Super Bowl' generalization of our world - You're on this side, I'm on that side; you're a Republican, I'm a Democrat; you're country music, I'm rock music.

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