A lot of my music is very roots-oriented, and that's country and soul. I've been in every roadhouse in the South, soaking in all of that... Nashville is like a second home to me, and I'm just gravitating toward the songs.

'Nashville' songs and country music have always been about storytelling and about the heart and confessionals. They're monologues.

To me, country music has always been the home for a great song.

Cooking is like music: you can tell when someone puts love into it. I come from a place where there was so much attention to detail. The population is smaller in the South, so more attention is given to serving smaller numbers of people.

Country music is all about telling stories, and we're just telling a little different one.

Guys like me and Ray Charles, when we was coming up through our days, country music and soul music was just a very thin line between the two.