You know, when you're an actor, you want to go to Hollywood. When you're a musician, you want to go to Nashville.
The Smithsonian should box and preserve Tim McGraw's Nashville den for a future exhibit entitled 'Early 21st Century American Man Cave.'
Everyone has their own path in life, no matter if it's being a celebrity or a singer. Quite frankly, I didn't move to Nashville and tell myself I wanted to be a singer because I wanted to be a celebrity or I wanted to be somebody that people admired. I wasn't about that. I just loved music.
When I was growing up in rural Alabama, it was impossible for me to register to vote. I didn't become a registered voter until I moved to Tennessee, to Nashville, as a student.
The songwriting community in Nashville really is all about your talent. It's not about your image, and you have to be humble. You have to be kind. You have to have zero ego when you walk into that writing room.
In terms of 'American Horror Story' and 'Nashville,' what attracted me to those, and 'Friday Night Lights,' for that matter, is that they felt like something innovative and something that we hadn't seen before. As an actor, that's exciting.
After Nashville sushi and a long debate on Bob Dylan, we went into Woodland Studios at 10 pm that night for a look around, and jammed for 5 hours solid.
I think I first realized I wanted to be in country music and be an artist when I was 10. And I started dragging my parents to festivals, and fairs, and karaoke contests, and I did that for about a year before I came to Nashville for the first time. I was 11 and I had this demo CD of me singing Dixie Chicks and Leanne Rimes songs.
I come from this really small town near Nashville, Tennessee, where everything was la-di-da and normal.
Nashville was totally different than I ever dreamed. I had only seen the music business on television and been to a couple of concerts. I had no clue.
I had no idea when I moved to Nashville people just were songwriters. I had no idea. So I guess I was selling myself as a singer when I first moved here. But then right after I first moved, I started writing a lot.
I wanted to live in Nashville. I wanted to sing country.
I should be the one to say what I do. It's just not done that way anymore in Nashville, and I can't do it the other way. That's how our record label came about.
I'd definitely love to play in Nashville again. That would be really good.
Texas was home. We went to Anchorage to get rich in 1959. Someone told us, 'If you drive a nail, you could make $100 a day in construction work.' We were hungry, and we stayed there for a year and a half. But I never did plan to stay there - the same with Nashville. I was gonna go up there and work, but Texas was home.
Robert Altman's 'Nashville' is my all-time favorite film because it covers all the bases - it's original, moving, and has something to say, but also funny and incredibly entertaining.
It was just like a dream. I could have ended up with an album that's not all that different from anything else coming out of Nashville. Mutt made the difference. He took these songs, my attitude, my creativity, and colored them in a way that is unique.
I did enjoy Nashville a lot of the time, because I made really good friends who were really good songwriters, and they would be a joy to hang out with.
Nashville has a formula, and it works a lot of the time, but it wasn't right for me. They're afraid to step outside the box - even though, with me, my success came because I was outside of the box to begin with.
Growing up in Nashville, especially in a music business family, means growing up with knowledge that seems like common sense until later in life when you realize people spend thousands of dollars a semester trying to learn or pretending to learn while looking for some intern job on music row.
Country artists, I met a lot of them when I was five, six years old. I had an uncle who was a country and western singer and I met Lefty Frizzell when I was five or six years old in those shows that would come through Toronto from Nashville.
I visited Minnie Pearl's home down in Nashville, and I liked it so much I asked the same man to help fix up my place.
It's nice coming to Nashville, and we have four-bedroom house and a dog, and we go swimming a lot. We get down here and spread out a lot, and I miss my sweet tea and my cornbread and my good southern cooking - but I'm down here eating pretty for two weeks and I'm ready to go back to New York City.
Nashville used to have more integrity than just looking at the bottom line.
When I was trained as a journalist, as a race-relations reporter in Nashville covering the end of the civil-rights movement, we were strictly forbidden to use the first-person pronoun. There was kind of an electric charge around it. To come out from hiding and use the word 'I' carried a lot of fright for me.
I didn't want to be a solo Westlife - covers and ballads - and the reason I signed with Capitol Records was because they wanted me to write songs myself. It was pretty scary, but they put me in a studio in Nashville with some new songwriters, and the results were pretty good.
Even though there are incredible songs floating around Nashville, it's important for me to have my voice heard.
I moved to Nashville at 17 to make music, and since then I've put everything I have into doing it right.
Mark Winchester has left the band. He's decided that he's tired of the road and just wants to concentrate on his career in Nashville. I don't blame him at all. He'll certainly be missed.
We have been so pleased with the response to our unique schools in the Nashville area, and we are confident that other areas will embrace our concept, as well.
My dad is in the music business in Nashville. I was the third child born in my family, and there are three notes in a chord, so that's how they came up with my name.
The Nashville Network, that's all I would watch as a kid.
I probably had the most fun recording For Richer For Poorer in Nashville.
Nashville's like any other hometown - after a while, it's stifling.
We're having such a great time on 'Nashville' that building on the relationship seemed an obvious next step. Lionsgate is the perfect home for the kind of scripted television I want to produce and direct.
I had been on the road for a long time and was not really getting anywhere. Bob Johnston, a friend of mine, had taken over Columbia in Nashville. He asked me if I wanted to come down. I did - thank God I did.