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I listen more to music when I'm on my computer. I'm into the latest YouTube thing. I'm a nanosecond kind of listener, but if I'm driving I would be listening to a Merle Haggard box set. It's a weird experience listening to 'Working Man Blues' by Merle Haggard and cruising around in a Porsche.
And I think it's safe to say that the single very impressive figure to me was Merle Haggard.
I've had mentors who were kind of the troubadour singer-songwriters, like Merle Haggard, Loretta Lynn, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan and Neil Young, and that's just what I've always liked - people who would talk real honestly about their lives and their circumstance.
You know, legends are people like Haggard and Jones and Wills and Sinatra. Those people are legends. I'm just a young buck out here trying to keep in that same circle with the rest of 'em.
Laughter is ever young, whereas tragedy, except the very highest of all, quickly becomes haggard.
I had always loved music. I grew up listening to classic country, Waylon Jennings, Merle Haggard. My dad loved Vern Gosdin and Keith Whitley. So I kept going to class and started getting totally into playing guitar and teaching myself these songs.
Many people have compared me to the Victorian adventure writer, Rider Haggard. I accept that as a compliment. As a boy growing up in Central Africa I read all Haggard's African novels.
I really like Alan Jackson, in Country Music. I think he's really very, very talented along with George Jones, and Merle Haggard, the same old favorites.
It's cool when your husband starts to sing some old Merle Haggard song and I can pop in with a harmony and it doesn't sound too bad.
I try to write like the writers I admire - I rip them off in form. It comes from George Strait and Merle Haggard records, and country music in general is really good at that, the twisted phrase... So I'm always looking for that angle in my own work.
