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There are so many music genres competing against each other, but I feel like country music has always been a unified front.

There's been a shift: Country music is popular music now. Every other genre wants to come over to our land.

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 is the people's music. It just speaks about real life and about truth and it tells things how they really are.

Country music belongs to America.

My definition of country music is really pretty simple. It's when someone sings about their life and what they know, from an authentic place.

Within the songwriting community, there are these unwritten rules for the way that a song should be written in country music, and I think that those rules are constantly being broken over the years, and the molds change and the process is evolving.

I would never do anything that makes the perception of country music worse.

We have a history in country music of writing about the darker side of things - maybe not as much in modern times, but there's a lot of cheating and self-deprecation. We sort it out in song, in country music, as a genre.

Country music has become the music that best represents the reality of American life.