Singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist with over 65 million airplays of his songs. He has gotten three GRAMMY nominations as a writer and as a musician and earned a Golden Globe nomination as well. He has been inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame, is a two-time BMI Songwriter of the Year, and a three-time NSAI Songwriter of the Year. He was one of Billboard magazine’s top five writers eight years in a row. At one point he had over 500 songs cut in an eight-year period, by over 100 artists, with 95 singles released, off more than 75 gold and platinum records, with over 50 million records sold.
“You write a lot of songs through your career, and you learn, and you reflect, and you observe and as time goes on you have different perspectives.”
“Everybody goes through stuff in their life but it’s what we turn that stuff into.”
“That's what I try to do all the time when I write, I always try to step back and go, ‘What's another angle to hit this from? Instead of the obvious angle, what's another angle?’ and that's kind of where I live.”
“Life is a moment that you’re in and everybody's worried about their future and what they did in their past, but you could only do what you're doing right now.”
“I'm in Los Angeles – Hollywood, basically – on the Sunset Strip in the late ‘70s, early ‘80s in one of the biggest musical eras ever… I was learning how to play… I started getting work in the studios as a singer, as a session singer, I was doing jingles and singing on other people's records, just knockin’ my head against the wall trying to get a record deal.”
“If you’re gonna get in the music business, you're gonna get hurt, you're gonna get bruised, you're gonna be told that you're terrible. But my real perspective is that that's the kind of life we all should chase after. We should all humble ourselves and let ourselves get pelted and figure out what it is that we are best at.”
“At my lowest point… out of nowhere these two hillbillies show up from Kentucky called Montgomery Gentry and they're looking for songs that have a southern rock flavor to them. And by that time, I had amassed a warehouse full of songs that had been rejected and they started hearing them and going, ‘Oh my God these are hit songs’.”
“I literally went, like, overnight from, ‘This guy doesn’t know what he’s doing,’ to ‘This guy’s a genius. Oh my God we gotta get this guy in the (writing) room’.”
“You have to be around a scene. You have to be around like-minded people that are trying to do the same thing. It's so inspiring when you're with those people.”
“If can I humble myself and step back a little bit and just go, Okay, what do these kids want me to do? I'm an old man with a lot of knowledge. I'm a smart guy in the room now. I can add a lot to a hit song by just sitting there and going, Okay, I wouldn't do that if I were you.”
“You have to love it more than anything. It has to be something you’d die for.”
“I can sit for four hours and tell stories that you wouldn't believe about how songs got recorded or how they got changed or how they got dropped and then re-recorded by somebody else – some of my biggest hits! Or everybody telling me that it was a dud and then it ended up being a song of the year.”
“We’re gonna go next week to Israel and Istanbul and Turkmenistan and Jerusalem to play some shows and some embassy shows.”
“My motto is, think like a writer. If you're a songwriter, you have to think like a songwriter all the time. You have to be an observer… Your whole life is to be the guy with the binoculars standing there and the microscope looking at everything. You’re the guy that’s documenting society right now.”
“Raise ‘Em Up”
“My Town”