Brad Paisley

“If you were to hold me to a standard of, 'What are you doing, singing about a scratch-off ticket at your level of success?' then my music's gonna be ridiculous.”

“I'm not comfortable doing a covers album.”

“You're a sitting duck in a mall if you're a celebrity. It's like that scene from 'Guarding Tess,' I think it is, where Shirley MacLaine goes to the mall just to feel good about her celebrity.”

“I'm a country musician. I know how to play jazz, and I can play rock. But I've had to fight my entire career to get a little respect from people who don't understand where I come from.”

“I feel sort of really aware of how the... online cyber world has begun to take over reality.”

“I don't like being surrounded by yes men.”

“I'm done with rules that are there just to be rules.”

“I love the Smothers Brothers.”

“There's something about being out here on the road that the hours aren't anything like what you're used to when you're at home.”

“We're trying to do the thing you don't expect out of country music. Which is to say, 'Go see the world.'”

“Country music's always had the best musicians in any format of music, and I always gravitated toward that, stuff that was musically interesting.”

“Deep down, I'm just a West Virginia hillbilly.”

“A hat has to be shaped to a person's face so it fights just right. It has to be done right. If you put my hat on, with my shape, you'd look like an idiot. If the bill is too high or too saggy, you look like a European tourist going to their first country concert.”

“There may be people in my audience who may not agree with me on some particular issue - you know, say, as a gun owner, they may not agree with me, or, you know, someone may not agree with me on a gay marriage topic. Any of those things. But those shouldn't be the reasons you listen to my music.”

“I love being an enigma. Every time I'm tempted to respond to someone who tries to put me in a box, politically - you know, someone who gets on the Internet and says, you're pro-gun, or you're anti-gun - I stop and say to myself, 'This is great; this is what I wanted. I wanted to be the guy you can't figure out.'”

“At certain times in your life, some things are heavier than others.”

“In the past, I tried to be more of a typical session guitarist. I wasn't so concerned with impressing anybody.”

“As long as you continue to have new songs, there's usually some new topic or something to present.”

“I had an old, red-covered '63 AC30 - one of the best AC30s I've ever heard. I cut the whole of the first record with it.”

“Guitar playing isn't really for everybody.”