It was Muddy Waters who took the Delta blues north to Chicago, electrified the sound, and changed the course of popular music as we know it. That's pretty much the judgment of history, and it is mine as well.
But the greatest thing about music is putting it out there for people to figure out. You want the listener to find the song on their own. If you give too much away, it takes away from the imagination.
Country music is just country. It's going to shift around a little bit, doing some different instrumentations, different production styles. But it will always come back to what you heard at the Opry. Nobody wants it to change.
Because you have things like 'American Idol' and you've got radio stations that play music made entirely by computers, it's easy to forget there are bands with actual people playing actual instruments that rock.
I started getting into Internet technologies and computers. I wasn't especially interested in being a musician, but I wound up finding my way back to being interested in music through computers.
That's what I love. Not being interrupted, sitting in a car by myself and listening to music in the rain. There are so many great songs yet to sing.
I have a 6-year-old, and his thing is to turn on Radio Disney in the car, and I get such an allergic reaction to listening to that music and the context into which it falls. I'm really working on him about that.
I don't like to feel like I'm in a club when I'm in my car and I turn on the radio. Anything that ceases to be a song and just sounds like house music kind of stresses me out.
And of course there's so much music in and around our family. I had a piano during Christmas because it's obviously useful through the season. There are so many people, songwriters, who are around.
I have a musical called Goodbye and Good Luck, based on a Grace Paley short story. I also have King Island Christmas, and there are 20 different productions of it this year.
Songs that aren't even remotely connected to Christmas are now officially canonized Christmas tunes. 'Frosty the Snowman,' 'Jingle Bells' and 'Winter Wonderland' never mention anything religious but are still notches in Christmas' belt of musical dom...
Music is my thing. It's my thing; it's what I love. It's what I do. It's football to me; it's Christmas to me; religion to me; poetry to me.
What people don't understand is that my dad isn't up on the contemporary music scene. He's been a legend for decades and he doesn't know what's going on right now, and he doesn't need to.
I don't really plan to be a pop star; I just want to be able to make music without the whole My Dad thing hanging over me, which everyone in my position goes through.
When I realized I was having trouble reading, I was too embarrassed to ask for help. Some teachers believed in me, but I just wasn't focused on school - I was into the music and trying to please my dad.
When you break it all down, my punk rock is my dad's blues. It's music from the underground, and it's real, and it's written for the downtrodden in uncertain times.
Music was always the distraction, so it was the obvious choice to pursue. My dad always said to find a job I love to do, that way it wouldn't feel like a job. So I did that.
When I used to do musical theatre, my dad refused to come backstage. He never wanted to see the props up close or the sets up close. He didn't want to see the magic.
My dad is a very quick-witted, sarcastic, dry, humorous guy, whereas my mom's very silly, and that side of the family is very musical.
I grew up in such a musical family, and my dad was the first chair in the Johannesburg Symphony Orchestra, and my mom was a piano teacher and a painter, so it was kind of a creative environment, and it was kind of in my DNA.
I was fantasising about my own death, I started thinking what my funeral would be like and what music would be played, I was at that level of insanity.
