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" What matters is what happens in the soul of an artist when you're playing. "

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" I got issues. Boy, have I got issues. "

" I'm a big fan of Lou Reed, and I do a lot of talking through songs. It's more effective with my vocal limitations and also more powerful to slightly sing sometimes. It depends on the emotion, but I'm never going to try to compete with great singers. "

" There's an ocean of misunderstanding. It's called the civilian-military divide. I had a lot to learn about our military - who they are, what burdens they carry. "

Misunderstanding

" I think each veteran's soul has something that it needs to say. I know from my own personal traumas, it's very hard to know what that is. But when I'm watching someone else struggle, it's not as confusing for me, 'cause it's not my struggle, so I can help identify that. "

" A lot of time, if you spend too much time in Nashville, songwriters get caught up in charts and numbers and the music business politics. "

" Soldiers are trained not to be vulnerable, but when they come home, they've got to learn it. "

" What I'm finding is there's an awful lot about adoption and relinquishment and the complicated nature of family that we, as human beings, haven't been able to have a real discussion about yet without a lot of censorship. "

" I came to music and knowing a little bit about life, and I came to music knowing a lot about business - and that's a real advantage. By the time I came to music, I had purchased real estate, opened restaurants, and been in the business world, so the music business didn't blindside me. "

" I teach songwriting a lot, and I always tell my students, 'You gotta write the little songs sometimes to get to the next big song in the chute.' You gotta write 'em to get to it. You never know what's going to be a little song or a big song. "

" Once I got my life sorted and started to get healthy, then I was able to focus on writing. "

" What I really like is this salted calamari - with jalapenos on top. "

" It is a form of arrogance to assume that other people are even thinking about you. "

" I think I'll always draw from being a person that doesn't know how to have a normal life, whatever a normal life is. "

" I think Bob Dylan showed us that songs can rise to the level of literature, and he proved it over and over again. That's why they keep trying to get him a Nobel Prize for literature: because there is no Nobel Prize for songwriting. "

" I don't play everything I write. I mean, everything I write is not that good. I bring out into the world the ones I think that are really worthy of an audience's attention. "

" Being in recovery for a lot of years now, I've worked with a lot of people who've gotten sober and sat with a lot of folks who are suffering. Bearing witness is a really underrated thing; it's a big damn deal. "

" I don't know who my dad is. "

" A lot of songwriters have written about soldiers and war, but very few have written with them. "

" I've come to terms with the fact that I'll probably be in therapy all of my life. "

" I'm sort of stuck in adolescence in many ways, like most artists, and march to my own beat. "

" I'm openly gay, and I've got a major label record deal in Nashville, and it happened when I was 42 years old. It's not supposed to happen that way. "

" Songs are here to help us: they build bridges from heart to heart. "

" I've learned our soldiers are so much like everybody else. They're just put into an extreme situation. "

" There's a universal inside of me. So if I tell my story, you're going to see parts of your story in it. I don't know which parts, but we all overlap. We're all very much alike. "

" If I start tracing, I bet I will find a writer in my family tree. "

" It can take me many months to write one of my own songs. "

" I write to make some sense of things that confuse me. The mechanics of my own heart are the most confusing I know about - and don't know about - and other people's are a bit confusing, too. "

" In a lot of ways, songwriting helped save my life. "

" People in Ireland take in the whole song. After a long history of great singers and songwriters and poets, they are able to consume the entire song - not just the external; they go inside. "

" I think music is the highest form of healing. "