00:00I wanted to be a cowboy really bad, and my parents definitely realized, and I think I realized at some point that I was no good at being an actual cowboy, so maybe the closest I could get was to sing about them.
00:10Obviously I've got a sonically reminiscent sort of thing going on from the 90s stuff,
00:36but I feel like I cut my teeth on the same stuff that the 90s guys cut theirs on.
00:43For one thing, I'm honored that people see me as sort of a spearhead or a leader back towards traditional country music or country music the way that I fell in love with it and still love.
01:00It's a fun spot to be in. I think it's a lot of just the right place, right time sort of a thing. Country music has always been cyclical.
01:10We've got our bread and butter, the roots, the traditions where we came from, and something new and a little edgy comes along and everybody gets excited about that for good reason,
01:21and kind of run with that for a little while until people are like, yeah, but this is where we came from, and let's get back to it a little bit, and so I think I came along at the right time for that.
01:32I was playing piano before I played guitar, but for whatever reason, I didn't have a whole lot of interest in Chopin and Bach and Beethoven and stuff like that.
01:51If somebody could have taught me to play piano like Pig Robbins, maybe I would have been excited about that, but the style of music I was into, the guitar lent itself more to that, I guess, so I kind of kicked and screamed through, shoot, it must have been seven or eight years of piano lessons, and they finally gave up on that, I guess, but I loved guitar.
02:12I played, probably from the time I was seven to 15, I played guitar for, shoot, two, three hours a day, probably. I just loved it.
02:29You mentioned the family band thing. We kind of stumbled on that by accident.
02:34I started playing guitar, my sister Maddie, she's a year and a half older than me, she started playing fiddle about the same time, and then shortly thereafter, my little brother Joram, he's a year and a half younger than me, he started playing mandolin, and then my oldest sister Laken was the one who taught us piano lessons.
02:50She picked up the bass, so we had us a little four-piece bluegrass band, I guess, and, well, it didn't start out as a band, we were all just kind of learning the instruments independently of one another.
03:01A good family friend of ours, he's actually our orthodontist, he'd heard we'd been playing a little music and wondered if we'd like to open up for the Patsy Cline musical that was coming to the local high school, and my dad was like, well, Randy, I don't know, you're going to have to ask the kids, I'm not going to answer that for them.
03:17I don't remember this, but I've been told the story enough times, I guess he put me on the phone, and Randy asked if we'd like to play a show, and I was like, yeah, we'd love to play your show, and when is it?
03:30He said, well, it's a couple months from now, and I said, well, perfect, by then we'll know some songs, and we'd love to play your show.
03:35So that was kind of how the whole family band thing started, and I guess we never gave it up for about the next ten years.
03:47I really didn't dive into writing much until I started coming to Nashville.
03:53My producer, Carson Chamberlain, was kind of the guy that brought me to town.
03:58He kind of posed it as a question to me whether or not I wanted to be a writer or whether it was important to me to write my own songs, and I kind of just said, I don't know, but I'll try it out.
04:08So we did, and he set up some co-writes for us and dove into it, and I really enjoyed it, mostly written with a bunch of old school writers, guys that were having hits in the 80s and 90s and stuff like that.
04:20And a big thing I feel like that I've picked up is don't try to be too tricky with the lyrics or the wordplay or stuff like that.
04:30Just say what needs to be said that gets the message of the song across and makes people feel something.
04:38I've been slowly going out of my mind
04:44I think that's another thing that's a bit of a dying art in Nashville, or just songwriting in general.
04:51If I just wrote songs about my life, my life's pretty boring, so I think people would lose interest pretty quickly.
04:57But if we stretch the truth a little bit, it comes from somewhere, honest, and then kind of make a story that's universal out of it.
05:04The day we wrote it, we kind of sat around after we got done making the work tape, and it was like, dang, this thing might have the makings of a first radio single.
05:13Which was kind of funny, sure enough, that was the first single we put out to radio.
05:17I think it's a great introduction to me and my music, that's one of those songs that doesn't have a big story to it, it's just kind of fun.
05:25A toe-tapper, a dancing song type of thing.
05:29I'm super excited about the response it got from everybody at radio.
05:34It's kind of like, well if you like this one, great, and if you don't, I don't know that there's much different coming.
05:47It's kind of crazy, the response that people had to I Never Lie.
05:51It's kind of crazy, the response that people had to I Never Lie.
05:54And I don't know that I would have picked that one to be the next one that blew up like that.
06:01I think that's one of the most country things on the album.
06:05Between that and maybe Use Me or something, those are just old school country ballad type of things.
06:12So for people to gravitate toward those, it's cool for me, I love it.
06:21I just got a new guitar, I love how that thing sounds, just sitting around messing with that.
06:26I've had a few new ideas come out, just musically.
06:30And heck, it can be as little as something you see on a t-shirt or a billboard or whatever that you pull out and think, hey that could be a song title or a hook idea or whatever.
06:42I think the biggest thing is just living life and trying to find a clever way to put what you're feeling and what you're seeing into words.
06:54And something that other people can resonate with as well.
07:02I love fiddle and steel guitar and that old school type of song.
07:07And it doesn't need to be old school, it's going to keep moving forward and keep progressing and keep being fresh and new.
07:13But the biggest thing I think is exactly that.
07:17The songs mean something and they say something and it keeps making people feel something.
07:30I don't think what I do is ever really going to change all that much.
07:35I love all different types of music.
07:38I think it's interesting, Ray Charles is a great example.
07:43He put out that, I know at least one big long country album.
07:48I say country, he covered a bunch of country songs but did them in Ray's style.
07:53And that kind of thing intrigues me a lot.
07:57Find some songs from other genres that I just love the songs and rework them to be exactly what I do.
08:06And give a different perspective on that song.
08:12You're not going to hear me put out a rock and roll album or a reggae album or anything.
08:16I don't know, you never know. I'll never say never, I'll say that.
08:20For right now I feel like I'm doing exactly what I love to do.
08:24And hopefully other people, fans and everything keeps enjoying that kind of thing for a long time.
08:31And I'm going to keep doing it, whether they do or not I suppose.
Comments