It became a metaphor for the lives of the people in this film and for the Old West, for the abandonment that occurred in the early part of the 20th century.
My parents were not affluent people and were not - didn't come from the extremities of education. My mother had a high school diploma. I often think I so wish she'd come out of the hills in Appalachia and been able to go on to college. I think she would have made a wonderful teacher.
To me, the hook of the riff is what makes a great guitar recording. It's the backbone of the whole song. When you have a strong riff, it's the rocket fuel for the track.
I am probably the last of a generation able to gain an education in country music by osmosis, by sitting in a '64 Ford banging the buttons on the radio.
I live out of cans a lot. But I try to indulge only in healthy canned food.
In the past 3-4 years I've developed a habit of keeping numerous small cassette recorders in my house and in a bag with me so that I'm able to commit to tape memory song ideas on a constant basis.
It varies from song to song, although Buck Owens and I recently collaborated on writing a duet together and am looking forward with a great deal of anticipation to recording that track for the new studio album.
I can't escape being born in Pike County, Kentucky, grandson of a miner, Luther Tibbs, and his wife, Earlene, and traveling as a child up and down Route 23 between Kentucky and Columbus, Ohio, where I was raised, experiencing life via working-class people. Nor do I want to escape.
As a writer, I always tend to take the liberty and the great artistic luxury of a composite form of writing.
No compression or as little as possible - that's how you get a good recording.
I'll never quit playing country music, or at least acknowledging it, always, as the cornerstone of what I am.
Quality is timeless: It will clearly define itself. And so I make reference to and acknowledge things that I feel have been dismissed, trying to restate those musical and cultural elements clearly and vehemently.
I played music and sang from my earliest memories. The first pictures of me show me wandering around with a guitar that was larger than I was, and it became almost second nature to me.
Film acting has been a very pure experience, because you have to give the purest form of yourself as an artist.
A voice expressing emotion in a musical way moves on. It's like the finale of the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) - the world turns in on itself, as a universe unto itself, in the shape of one human being.
I was very fortunate in having David Fincher, the director come to me. Now I've seen the finished product, I feel that every bit of the nine months we spent on the film was worth it.
Ironically, the success I've experienced at country radio has left me ostracized from pop and other formats of radio.
I think actors are at the mercy of the opportunities presented to them. So you kind of have to wait for them to choose you. My music is insular - I can choose that.
When I was in junior high, a foreign-history teacher started a theater class. So I got my feet wet there and through high school, so I was very fascinated with acting as a means of expression.
It's meant to reaffirm the validity of that music - clean, minimalist, honest, classic music.
