A recording artist who has toured the world, sold hundreds of thousands of records, and written songs recorded by superstars. Just under two weeks ago he released a new album and the same day a new documentary premiered on Amazon Prime, exploring his life story. His top two songs on Spotify alone have a combined total of over 859 thousand streams and he has shows coming up in central Florida and in North Carolina. He has performed on “Good Morning America,” Fox News, CMT, and more than a dozen appearances on the Grand Ole Opry. He had risen to fame with his debut single "Lipstick," which dominated the Billboard Country Singles Chart for ten weeks.
“Most of them are solo writes. I've been writing pretty much every day for decades and decades and then when I had my record deal on Universal I started doing a good bit of co-writing.”
“I enjoy co-writing but I think that the more truthful things usually come when you're writing by yourself.”
“Ever since I started playing in bands my only real criteria wasn't even really the style of music… but the main thing I wanted was, I wanted to be in a band where everybody in the band was better than me so I could learn off of them so I could thrive off that.”
“When I was in high school, I wanted to go to this school in California called GIT, it was a big guitar school, and my arrangements financially were pretty poor, and I didn't have a lot of the options. So, for me, the option was to go to work at the furniture factory in the little town of Statesville, where I lived, or to join the army. And if I joined the army, they would pay for me to go to that school in California. So, the day after high school I went into the army.”
“I was deployed while I was in the military and saw the other side of what being in the army is like and so that's why I started my charity. I started it 21 years ago and it's called Tribute to the Troops.”
“I had a song that was on the Oak Ridge Boys greatest hits record and I had written Arrows at Airplanes with Steve Wariner, which was a single as well.”
“I realized that that music not only spoke to me when I wrote it, it spoke to those young men and women that were serving and I didn't want to make any money off of it… So, we decided, that's where the college fund idea came from… we actually have raised over one and a half million dollars and sent 123 people to college.”
“I said, ‘Man, there ain’t a person that talks like me within 500 miles of this place,’ so I decided to move to Minneapolis, Minnesota. After 15 years in Nashville… I moved to Minneapolis, and I started over and within a year and a half we had sold 150,000 records.”
“I just don't get nervous. I figure I'm not going to get any better or get any worse, so I just go up there and do the best I can.”
“Some of the greatest people who have been songwriters like Bob Dylan and John Prine and Tom Petty and Burt Bacharach, for that matter, weren't really great singers they were great communicators.”
“Where I Belong”
“My Father’s Guitar”