There are still great artists in the country format.
We can help show data on how much the kids can improve when their home life changes a little bit.
We bled writing these songs, we bled in the studio, and now we’re out bleeding getting them right live.
I didn’t think I liked country music. Then I got into Garth Brooks.
We don’t want to abandon any of the market we have now. We just want to gain new market.
It’s an honor to live on a legacy, getting to do what we love to do and try to be the best musicians that we can possibly be.
I have an outdoor kitchen at home in Georgia, and I try to never eat inside.
Other people pull off amazing festivals and events and things like that. I think ours is a little bit different, and that’s what makes us distinct.
I try to get away and take my motorcycle on a ride whenever I can. I’ll take my bike out before the show and just cruise.
I’ve got a couple of Harleys and a couple of Ducatis.
It’s important that people come see our show, because we are performers. We wanted people to see that.
We’re really blessed that we’ve been as well received as we have been.
We always push the boundaries on the styles we put on a record.
To get to record and to do things with the legends, and with the people that are your musical heroes, that’s the biggest honor as an artist.
It’s always humbling, knowing where we came from. From being friends with the janitor in the bar and being friends with the waitress – because they were some of the only people that were listening when we finished playing – to this, we are able to appreciate every single person and every single piece of it, because we came from nothing to this.
Visually, a lot of the electronic artists have really interesting video and interesting things like that.
We just couldn’t seem to get the love from the Nashville awards shows… So Grammys really gave us validation, and so that’s why they’re such a big deal for us.
Our boundaries have dissolved, and we’re going to still do things that are somewhat familiar that people like, but we’re also going to stretch out and take chances beyond what we’ve done before.
The world needs some help.
We’re fabricating a state-of-the-art concessions system for our touring, so we can feed the people and give them everything they need without having to wait on it.
My brother’s 21 years older than me, so I grew up doing more adult things. Like listening to old music.
I’ve been making some more electronic music, which I really enjoy doing.
We love our fans and are very connected with our fans.
Thanks so much to all the fans. To all our team, to all our wives, especially, that believe in us and that we come home to, and everybody here that’s given us a shot.
I don’t like cooking just for myself; I enjoy feeding other people, particularly outdoors.
I have seen a lot of people, including myself, make a lot of tip money because of ‘Black Water,’ so this is a full circle moment. To collaborate and recreate this iconic song is just an amazing moment as an artist.
‘A Pirate Looks at 40,’ we had to do that song. I’ve been covering that forever.
If I’m chartering in and out and flying home after I play, that doesn’t make sense. But where we can bus, then we’ll bring the family out and spend time with them during the day.
We want to support Nashville, support the community there and be a part of it.
I just hope everybody stays with us. We are not trying to be snobs or jerks. We are in a whirlwind trying to figure out the best way to be accessible.
We just kept going down the road, we kept trying to make the next record, the right choices to get there.
I’m gonna tell y’all what we tell the crowd every night when we play back in the States. We tell them to remember people sleeping in a sandstorm so that we can be free.
Some people are gonna hate anything; they’re gonna hate when anybody tries to go or do anything, and that’s usually the people who don’t ever create anything themselves.
When I was growing up, my dad and I would go hunting and camping every weekend. Like everyone in my family, he is an amazing cook, and I’ve tried to learn a lot from all of them.
Every record we do, we do one song we didn’t write.
The Southern Ground warehouse is rocking and rolling in Atlanta, with a T-shirt shop and a leather shop; everything we’re selling at our shows we’re making or publishing ourselves.
When songs make me wanna throw up, it makes me ashamed to even be in the same genre as those songs.
I love coming to Detroit. First getting to be buddies with Kid Rock in the beginning, and him being really great to us, showing us love, the love of the city. I feel like it’s our city now, too.
I remember the first time I heard ‘The Thunder Rolls.’ It was dark, and we were driving to the beach. There was the thunder outside and the thunder in the song. It was eerie.
The chemistry that you get from living with your band and creating music and recording with your band translates to the stage.
I hope everybody enjoys our input on ‘Black Water’ – it sure was a lot of fun getting to record it.
I’m no different than any other human being. I play music for a living, and we’re very blessed.
There are still artists that do a great job with a song, and they care about the lyrics, and it’s not just mindless drivel.
I don’t want to look back and say, ‘Yeah, I was really successful, but I failed at fatherhood because I wasn’t there.’
Our music has been an incredible gift to help us make a difference.
I had a restaurant in Georgia for a while, and I really miss feeding everybody.
You’ve got to be willing to put the time into seeing who’s got talent and who’s going to do a great job.
All my siblings being all different ages meant I got exposed to music that was 20-30 years older than me. And that was a big influence.
The lyrics are so important to me. And that there is something going on in the lyrics. That the song actually has something to say.
If you break down most rock songs and look at the lyrics on a piece of paper, it’s all about melody. It’s all about presentation. And a lot of bands are really great, but you can’t understand a word of what they say.
It’s a crazy experience for me to be in a Foo Fighters video.
If I hear one more tailgate in the moonlight, Daisy Dukes song, I wanna throw up.
I’m opinionated because I care so much about the music and the songs.
I don’t ever want to stop making country, and I don’t want to stop making electronic music, either.
You have a feeling when you’re recording, like, ‘This is gonna translate really well,’ and when you see it live, and it kind of proves that, that’s an amazing feeling.
Family comes out whenever we know it’s gonna be steady on a run that’s continuous.
I want to get better every year.
Country fans and country listeners deserve to have something better… a song that really has something to say, something that makes you feel something.
When you’re wearing a motorcycle helmet, people don’t know who you are. So I just wander around and, yeah, it’s pretty awesome.
Good music makes you feel something.
I always thought it was sad that you couldn’t get anything really good to eat at concerts, so we sit down with our fans before every show and eat a gourmet meal that we made for them.
We’ve gone further on this album, where we have a Big Band song, kind of a Sinatra-type song; we have a couple songs that have electronic music on them. We’ve got a couple rock songs, maybe a little heavier than what we’ve done. So the title ‘Jekyll & Hyde’ really covers the breadth of the record.
When you are a singer, you have to nurse yourself and make sure you don’t get a cold.
The Doobie Brothers are one of my favorites of all time.
We’re proud to be lifetime musicians and a band that lives like a band and loves the music and gives our lives to it.
I don’t think a lot of bands and artists work as hard as we do on the creation, on the writing, the arrangements and the recording in our format.
We’re all continuing to grow up and get better as musicians, and the chemistry as a band continues to deepen.
Camp Southern Ground is a lot more than a camp. It’s more of a campus.
Sir Rosevelt is a little more of a persona, and we dress up, three-piece Tom Ford suits, and it’s a little more refined, visually.
I was a music fan first way before I started creating it, so I still get giddy when I get to be around people that I respect so much.
When we cover a Chainsmokers song in our live show with ZBB, people are dancing and going crazy.
A lot of concerts leave you wanting for something good to eat or drink while you’re there.
When I get drafty cold air in my ears, I would get an earache and get sick. I had to make sure I hustled and stayed well for my shows that I played.
I can’t stand having cold air blowing in my ears, so when it’s cold at my house, or if I am outside, I am going to have my ears covered up.
I’m from Georgia, and everybody gathers around food in the South.
Everybody in my family cooks, so growing up and being around it… if I was going to spend time with everybody, it was helping them in the kitchen.
When I’m home, I’m Daddy, and everything is completely normal.
Everybody in my band is a lion, and everyone’s mastered their own domain… And we have a platform, and we have built it painstakingly and punched ourselves in the face every way we could to get where we are.
We’re not just going to take some songs from a focus group in Nashville where people are sitting around in a circle having appointments trying to write catchy songs so they can sell them to a band like us.
People come up to me sometimes and ask for a picture but don’t even say hello. They sort of forget that I’m a person.
It doesn’t seem expected for us to do something like that, but I love electronic music. I spend a lot of my time listening to that and just trying to understand what makes it work – what makes it move people the way it does and why they have some of the best-selling festivals in the world.
You can de-select the songs that you don’t want to have on the record, but I hope we always put something out that has a lot of songs that the majority of people will love.
Not a lot of the country format I enjoy listening to.
I try to be really conscious. I don’t want to ever look back and regret not raising my kids and not being around.
If we had to pose for every single person at the Eat & Greets, we wouldn’t get to speak to anyone that’s there, and we definitely wouldn’t get to serve them food.
I never get used to going out and seeing 20, 30,000 people that are there to see us play. It’s kind of surreal.
Maybe some people that only listen to electronic music will pick up my record and get turned on to some of the story songs, some of the more country-type stuff.
Getting to have a higher purpose other than just being successful is very necessary for me.
To me, country music has always been the home for a great song.
I was probably 21 or 22 years old when I realized the prose that I live by, which is, ‘You get what you give.’ The more good deeds that you could do in your life, the more fulfilling and enriched your life is going to be. I truly believe that.
I love to smoke things; there’s usually something always in the pot outside. That smell of something in the smoker just reminds me of home.
You can tell all our songs come from us and from our artists, the people we write with and travel with.
In my opinion – in Georgia, there’s a town called Lula. And Lula, Georgia, has the best peaches.
Each song has its own life.
Talent alone gets you nowhere. You really have to have the grit, and you gotta have a love for people.
To be a Southern Ground artist, you have to be a lifer. It’s not about winning a karaoke contest or a television show to become famous. It’s about really paying your dues. It’s people I’m fans of and want to help in the business.
We ended up New Year’s Eve playin’ a show. My date had stood me up, and I remember walkin’ back to my friends with, like, two minutes before midnight and thinkin’, ‘I’m not gonna have anybody to kiss on New Year’s.’ And there she was, standin’ right there, and I remember kissin’ her, and then that was game over.
I don’t want my children to have any kind of ego or entitlement because of what I do. I want them to be good people, and we fight every day so that they’ll be that way.
It does make me sad that there’s a lot of great songs out there, and they’re not going to see the light of day because they’re competing with these tailgate songs.
