Most artists, you know, you spend their entire lives learning how to play music and write songs, and they don't really know how the music business works.
If everyone in the music business were brutally honest about what their intentions were then you could sort things out, but it's all smoke and mirrors.
There's much more money being brought into the advertising and communications business than in the music industry.
What is music anyway? It's a form of communication, and that's why I play the kind of music that I think - that I hope - can communicate with people.
I'm not here to change the music world, but I'm definitely here to show what I can do and express myself through my music.
Music is something that always lifts my spirits and makes me happy, and when I make music I always hope it will have the same effect on whoever listens to it.
When I had my television show, 'Barbara Mandrell and the Mandrell Sisters,' it was my high hope to convert people to country music. It is wonderful and contagious!
The music is the message, the message is the music. So that's my little ministry that the Big Man upstairs gave to me - a little ministry called love and happiness.
The whole history of pop music had rested on the first person singular, with occasional intrusions of the second person singular.
Right around the end of the fifties, college students and young people in general, began to realize that this music was almost like a history of our country - this music contained the real history of the people of this country.
Punk was more based on social change than on music, so it didn't bother me too much. It wasn't really a musical threat.
When your dad is a country music fan and you take long car trips, you become one too.
I love Nashville. It's such a great town, and I'm a huge country music fan. That's what I listen to on the radio in the car.
The pastor of a parish will typically have no education in the chant or in music, and he will hire the first music director who walks through the door.
I have no doubt that there are great people about though... the thing of it is, nothing to this day moves me like classical music (Debussy, Vaughn Williams).
As far as I was concerned the important thing was that the music was getting the attention as well as me so it was always a great way to get more of the public to connect with classical music, and opera particularly.
I suppose that's why new music and I go well together, because new music often requires maintaining great rhythm.
I like this town, it's really great. They've put me in The Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame. This town is about music. It's about the kind of music I like.
I think Shakespeare is really the one. Words as music and music as words. Everything he wrote was good, which is really frightening.
It doesn't matter how good you are as a band or how good your music may be; if the fans aren't supporting it and buying your music, it's hard to make it.
I feel like Sony appreciates good music from a talented artist.