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I love country; I'm gonna do a country solo album at one point just 'cause. I'm a big fan of Keith Urban, Trace Adkins, Rascal Flatts, even though that's more pop. I grew up on country.

Even though I'm a pop singer, I really have more the life of a country singer.

What is nice about country music today is that most artists are not trying to do something everybody else is doing. They really are trying to develop their own uniqueness.

Country music busts the wall between performer and audience. There's a connection because there's a vulnerability, a confessional quality, to so much of the songwriting. Those lyrics take you in.

Everyone loathes his own country and countrymen if he is any sort of artist.

Undeniably, I'm a country singer; I'm a country songwriter. But I feel like I make country music for people who like country music and for people who don't.

I know people who have written big hit country songs that are really kind of terrible songs, but for the rest of their life, they're the guy who wrote that. You've got to be careful; if you don't want that to happen, don't write those songs.

I just don't see myself as a songwriter or a country singer or any of those things anymore. It's more trying to express ideas and emotional textures.

People do look at it as an insult that I say I don't listen to country music, which cracks me up.

Well the country songs themselves are three-chord stories, ballads which are mostly sad. If you are already feeling sorry for yourself when you listen to them they will take you to an even sadder place.