As an artist, one of the ingredients to doing good work is self-awareness, and that's something I cultivate.
My mother's a very spiritual woman, and I think Pentecostal religion, Bible religion, was very important to her because it gave her a context for a very spiritual approach to life.
Of course, you can't teach songwriting. You can only encourage people to do it and help them to sort out for themselves what they want to achieve, and get a list of exercises together that improves the craft and gives them more access to the craft of writing good songs.
I have a history, and I am proud of my legacy as a songwriter, all of the songs that I've brought forth into our culture. I'm proud of that.
I read Nabakov for style, Mary Karr for heart and resonance of where I come from. She's from the same part of the world that I'm from. Cormac McCarthy and Hemingway, to read the masters.
Certainly, writing a book was challenging. It took me a long time to learn how to do it. It took me seven years to get a sense of how to wean myself off the process and trickery of songwriting. You realize that giant metaphors work in songs because you have so few words. Standing alone on a page, they threaten to be overblown in a hurry.
For me, my career has never been about what I've done. But it's been about becoming, achieving, and pushing myself further.
I don't think that 'The Weight of the World' is all about politics. It's like, how the environment and how the natural topography of this planet would ever fall into a political division, debate, just leaves me confused.
I'm enough of a southeast Texas boy - there's enough white trash in my blood that when somebody gives me money to make a record, I feel like I have to please them instead of myself.
People ask me, 'What is the mystique of the Texas songwriter?' Well, we ran barefoot from March until November. I think there's something about being a barefoot kid that gets you closer to the place - you take root.
The beautiful despair is never fruitless. It keeps you going. Like when I first heard Bob Dylan do 'Things Have Changed,' or any time I see any work of art really beautifully done, like Michelangelo's 'The David' or that movie 'Lost in Translation' - it inspires me to try and find my own version of that.
When I was 22 years old, and I first got to Nashville, women or girls were objects. It was a conquest. My emptiness inside and the external manifestation of my ego was to somehow conquer women.
Sustaining a narrative in sentences and paragraphs is very different from songwriting. But the dedication to the craft and just the endurance that it takes, you know, to stick with it and believe you can pull it out and make it real and finish it, I learned that a long time ago writing songs.