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With 'Light,' I collaborated with a lot of different producers and musicians I respected, and we all wrote and worked on material which I then took to an old-school producer, David Kahne, and we put it all together. The lyrics came first - they were written before the music.

I've had this song in a drawer for a long time, maybe seven or eight years. Every time I'd do an album, I'd take it out and listen to it, and always liked what it had to say. Plus when Garth came in and sang on it, that made it really special.

I picked and co-wrote the songs that if I was a guy who would be spending my hard-earned money buying an album I would want to hear.

I'm really proud of 'Bright Lights' because I was still in the mind frame of my first album when I was putting it together, but next time I want to display something different. I don't want to be as young, immature and all about boys!

I wanted to make the album I always needed to make. I had to say the things I never could.

The first album I bought was the Spice Girls, ha ha.

I could have done a hundred songs, really. It was hard to narrow them down, because I tried to pick songs for the most part that actually did have some effect on me or influenced me in the past.

I get tips from Bob Gaudio. And one of my songs somehow caught the attention of one of my idols, Marty Panzer, who wrote big hits for Barry Manilow. So two guys who inspired me to write lyrics are now teaching me to write.

I did the co-writing thing all through the '90s and I got one hit out of it - a Keith Urban song called 'But For The Grace Of God' - but then I got burnt out.