"We were walking through before figuring out which dressing room we were gonna put you guys in" " and we found three that you might like." "Uh-huh." "All right!" " Oh, we got the ladies'." " Yeah." "I don't recognize any..." "I don't know any of these people." " Is this where you put Prince?" " Uh, yes." "If Prince was ever to be here," "I would specifically request he be in this room." " Oh, no, this is the Porter Wagoner suite." " Yes!" "Uh, with the "Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat."" "That's really great." "That is a good look." "And it's right next to Charley Pride." "I bet that's Charley Pride." "No?" "So this has some photos of folks in your genre." "Oh, our team." " Is that Warhol?" " It is." " "Warhol."" " He's definitely on our team." " Jack Black." " Oh, on our team!" "Yep." "What the hell is he doin' here?" "And Lassie on, well..." "On our team." "Wow, Kevin Costner has played the Grand Ole Opry?" "Rad." "_" "Ta-da!" "Good evening." "Hi, everybody." "Wow!" "I might suck." "You know that, right?" "So, my name's Dave Grohl," "I'm a drummer." "And, uh..." "I'm a newcomer to the Bluebird." "I'm kind of excited." "I've heard a lot about it." "And the more I learn about this place, the more I realize that if you can come to Nashville and make it, there's a lot of rites of passage you gotta, like, go through in order to get there." "This stage is just as important as a lot of those other rites of passages." "So, it's an honor to be here tonight." "And I thank you very much for watching me perform." "One of these days, I'm gonna get my big break, man." "That week in Nashville," "I felt like a fish out of water..." "But in the most refreshing way." "Everybody now thinks that Nashville is the coolest city in America." "Nashville, it's all about the song." "It's about songs." "I think New York and L.A. are known as "the record business"" "and Nashville is really a songwriter's town." "If you can call up Garth..." ""Hey, say, I got a song,"" "good chance he'll say, "Let me hear it."" "There's just so many fabulous, creative people." "And I remember thinking," ""I did the right thing by moving here."" "It just became a destination to record their songs, to be a star." "Even if they're not necessarily in country music, it's like they come here to write here." "If they got lucky with a couple of hits, they could have a big office and a Victorian house on Music Row a few years later." "And it happened." "It happened over and over again." "It was like the Hollywood of music for people in the South." "Before I came here, all I really knew about Nashville was its reputation as the "country music capital of the world."" "But what I learned is that within the music industry, it's like a country hit factory." "It's big business." "But it didn't necessarily start out that way." "Well, I was born and raised up in East Tennessee..." "The foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains." "It's like I've come from the Stone Age to this new, high-tech world." "It's, like, crazy." "But in the early days, we didn't have electricity." "We just had a battery radio when I was little when we used to listen to the Grand Ole Opry." "From Nashville, Tennessee, Music City, USA, it's Grand Ole Opry time!" "So when you're a kid and you're growing up, what do you think of Nashville?" "I mean, it almost seems like "Emerald City," you know?" "Like..." "It was the idea of going to Nashville..." "The Grand Ole Opry was the word that stuck out, not Nashville so much." "You had to be on the Grand Ole Opry, or you were not a country artist." "All of my life, when I was little," "I mean, that was my first dream..." "To get to Nashville and be on the Grand Ole Opry." "Thank you just a whole lot and a great big howdy and welcome to the "Martha White Time"" "on the Grand Ole Opry." "Mighty glad to have all of you with us." "Right now, let's get together and give a great big welcome to a beautiful little lady that records one hit song right after the other." "Miss Dolly Parton!" "How 'bout it?" "The Ryman is the original Grand Ole Opry House." "It's the legacy of country music." "It's the "Mother Church" of country music." "They call it the "Mother Church"" "'cause it once was a Mormon tabernacle." "To me, the Grand Ole Opry..." "There's something about that room." "The history of that room, the way it sounds..." "Everything bled into everything else." "And so you learned to live with those little things that might have not been perfect, but the performance..." "It was about the performance." "And it's about a story." "Country music, it's the genre for storytelling." "You get to know the characters within four minutes and fall in love or hate." "The best country to me is the beautiful, simple melody telling a simple story." "And that's the end of the story of me and Joshua." "Thank you so much." "They were really good songs." "Still are." "And in country music, it's about that simplicity." "It's all about the story." "Pretty much the only person I know in country music is Zac Brown." "I met him a few years ago in Los Angeles." "We were in a store, right before the Grammys." "We exchanged numbers, and I was like, you know," ""Dude, it would mean so much if we could do something together one day."" "I'd heard of Zac Brown." "I remember seeing a picture of him in Rolling Stone." "I read that he would barbecue for his audience before shows, which I thought was really cool." "I went back to my band, and I was like," ""What if we could get Dave Grohl to produce our record for us?"" "They were all just like, "Holy shit."" "So, somehow, I tricked him into doin' it." "So I went all the way to Nashville without ever hearing any of his music." "Before I came here," "I had never, ever, ever heard your band, ever." "Not one song." "I had never heard one of your songs, ever." "I sat down, hit record, they started playing, and that was the first time I'd ever heard a Zac Brown song." "I instantly felt like we were cut from the same cloth." "In six days, they made me feel like I was a part of their family." "Part of their world." "I consider Zac somewhat of an outsider in Nashville." "Someone who works outside of the system and plays by his own rules." "Plus, he fuckin' rips on guitar." "Zac could be in Slayer." "He could be in the fastest death metal band in the world." "Well, I started taking classical guitar when I was seven, and started figuring out nylon strings." "I could play, like, some intricate pieces that I learned with my lessons, but then I would go to camp, and there'd be kids sitting around strummin'." "And I'm like, "What are you..." "What is that?"" "And it was a chord." "I was like," ""What is..." "What..." "How many chords are there," you know?" "Where are you from?" "I'm from North Georgia, which is kind of where the Appalachian Mountains start." "When I was about 14, I got a gig opening up for Shawn Mullins at a coffeehouse in Dahlonega." "I played a lot and I sang a lot but I hadn't played and sang, accompanying myself a lot." "I remember seeing them play and I'll never forget it." "I was like..." ""That's what I wanna do." "I wanted to write songs that told a story, and to me that's where country music lives." "The stories are in there." "You know, one of the crazy things about your band is that you can do anything." "I'm always trying to shake it up." "It's about music, not country music for me." "We just try to write great songs." "We try to move people, we try to make that fan experience great, we try to gain fans." "That's our goal." "Zac Brown Band!" "Zac Brown Band, "Uncaged."" "Zac Brown." "When I decided to come back to Nashville, it only made sense to bring the band to Zac's place." "Because he bought one of the oldest studios in town." "I love your music!" " Thank you." " Thank you, thank you, thank you." "I didn't even turn around." "I mean, I know she's not talking to me." "Hello!" " How you doin'?" " What up?" "Wow, this place is fuckin' incredible." " Dude, this place is amazing." " Yeah, it is." "It's quite beautiful, isn't it?" "Oh, it's so pretty!" "What's up, guys?" "This is badass." "The studio is an old church built in 1901." "Used to be Monument Records." "It was the first independent recording studio on Music Row." "It was always a studio with a great atmosphere." "It just..." "It had some "great vibes" in it, as people say." "Neil Young loves this studio." "He was in town working on his "Prairie Wind" album." "And I got the call to come down and do some vocal work." "This is wormwood, is that what that is?" "Wormy cypress." "But it's not reflective." "The fact that it's got hollow chambers and everything in it adds something..." " I love this space." " I love the sound of this place." "There's something about the wood, or just the fact it's old." "I do like old things... as now I am becoming one." "You're in a studio that's personal, and you walk into a space that has meaning and is not just a homogenized thing that feels like you're in a waiting room at a dentist's office, you know what I mean?" "I wanna walk into a place and be kind of, like, amazed and creeped out all at the same time." "When we walked in here and opened the door, the mics were still on the stands and like, things were still plugged in." " It was like..." " Like..." "It was as if they were in a session, then they left and locked it," " and that was it." " Weird." "Tape vault's completely full." "All the old tapes in there, the file cabinets are full of everybody's names." "These down here are the old Monument Records logs" " that actually got..." " No way!" "...left here, and I was gonna show you this one right here." "Whoa!" "Like, look back on any day in 1969 and you can see that Jerry Lee Lewis was here," "I think Roger Miller." "Think there's a bunch of Kris Kristofferson." "Yeah, this is all Kris." "Oh, my God." "Wow!" "Like, this is a museum." "Everybody that I've ever really respected has recorded here." "And I was like, if we do anything less than make this place amazing, then we're doing an injustice, 'cause the soul of the place is here, the bones are here." "When we walked in on Monday and started rehearsing, the song was not there 100%, and I think all of us were stressing a little bit." "It was our first day here, and we're trying to figure out the arrangement." "And we were kind of having trouble with it." "And I swear to God, I looked up at that arch and the light coming through there, and I totally had this moment where I'm like," ""Oh my God, now I get it."" "Hey, let's grab acoustics and go through..." "I have an idea for an arrangement thing." "And in 24 hours, we kind of overhauled the arrangement and let the song breathe a little bit more." "Yeah, tie it off there." "Good take, boys." "T, that was great!" "Whoo!" " Come on in and listen to that one." " Yeah, yeah." "Now, I'm not a religious person." "I got sent to Catholic school 'cause I was bad." "Maybe it was just being in a place that used to be a church, I don't know." "But when that light hit me through that window," "I felt inspired." "That's one thing that I learned, being in Nashville that's so different from my background... is that the foundation of a lot of this music comes from the church." "I came to Nashville and got into country music because country is the closest thing to gospel." "Where are you from?" "I'm from Winston-Salem, North Carolina." " And your father was a..." " He was an evangelist." "My dad was a fanatic." "I wasn't allowed to listen to anything but religious music growing up." "When people ask me to this day, after all the years I've been producing records," ""What's the first record you ever bought?"" "And I think they think I'm gonna say" "Bo Diddley or Chuck Berry or Elvis, or the Beatles." "And it was George Beverly Shea singing "How Great Thou Art,"" "because that's the only record they'd let me buy." "Back in the days of Porter Wagner and Hank Williams, they always had a gospel song in their repertoire." "You know, Cash really always had a gospel song." "Church was just a big part of that country life." "There was nothing much to do, so church was not only the rock and foundation, but it was also recreation." "The church choir thing..." "You're just in such an encouraging environment." "You know, people are just happy to hear ya, happy that you're there, happy that you're you know, singing about..." "Singing about God, and just be encouraging." "It would be instant positive feedback." "It's called "preaching to the choir."" "Yeah, I guess." "So, yeah." "It's nice to know that there's music that has a foundation that isn't rooted in misery." "'Cause that's where mine comes from." "When I was playing gospel music," "I eventually played in a group who wanted to make a record." "So we came to Nashville." "The next step I made toward secular music was to play with Elvis." "On the piano, from Nashville, is Tony Brown." "And the reason I got the job with Elvis was because..." "He wanted to be in gospel music." "Elvis was very religious." "One time, we were in Notre Dame..." "And right in the middle of the arena, there was a row about midway back, a bunch of ladies, and in between songs, they stood up." "And they had a banner that read, "Elvis, you're the king."" "And it stretched all the way across the center section." "And Elvis went," ""No..." "Jesus Christ is the King."" "And they went..." "pshew!" "And I went, "Aw, bless their hearts."" "They probably painted that for, like, days." "They thought, "He's gonna love us, he's gonna call us to the stage."" "He just shut 'em down." "Yeah!" "So my Elvis connection came out of gospel." "The piano player that I replaced left Elvis Presley to go with Emmylou Harris." "Yes!" "When Elvis passed away, this piano player had left" "Emmylou Harris to go play with John Denver." "John Denver stole my band." "He..." "So Emmylou Harris called me." "And I can't believe this, but I actually made" "Tony Brown audition." "I just thought that's what you did." "Of course, he was great." "Emmylou Harris is my hero." "She's a mixture of Dolly Parton, Joni Mitchell..." "And her voice was like butter." "She has got the greatest ear for songs of anybody I've ever seen." "I can tell you right now, my influence in country music is Emmylou Harris." "She turned me on to country music." "I remember..." "We were in Oklahoma City..." "Emmylou said, "Go over to the jukebox and play George Jones' 'He Stopped Loving Her Today.'" "It's gonna kill you."" "It would just bring you to your knees, you know?" "Jukeboxes were such a big part of country music, just because, you know, honky-tonks have jukeboxes." "Singles sales in country music weren't people goin' out and buying..." "It wasn't like kids going out and buying singles." "That wasn't the meat of it." "It was jukeboxes." "Yeah, you'd always get up and play the jukebox, especially in truck stops and in cafes." "That was a big, big deal." "Albums were compilations of singles." "To make money, you had to keep putting singles out." "The great songwriters were artists and you got not just hits, but copyrights that were recorded over and over and over again." "It was the gathering place for all the writers." "That's how I came to Nashville." "Do you know Tony Joe White?" " I recorded with Tony." " Did you?" "I recorded on a Tony Joe White record." "You know, we did a festival with him down in Australia." " It was just him and a drummer." " Yeah?" "And he..." "He got such an encore, he came back and smoked an entire cigarette before he went back onstage." "I mean, I'm like, "Have they stopped clap..." "I'd better get out there before they stop clapping."" "I'm from a little town in Louisiana." "My dad was a farmer." "He'd owned and raised cotton and seven of us kids." "I'm really a seventh son." "They all played guitar and piano." "And it was mostly gospel and country music back then." "Till my brother, he brought an album home by Lightnin' Hopkins, an old blues singer." "Man." "Turned me." "Went on down to Texas." "And on down in Texas, you know, you had to pick up a few country things or the beer bottles would come sailing across the room." "We saved up enough for me after about a year to take a week off, and I had put a couple things down on a little tape player, so I thought I'd like to get someone to hear it." "And I said Memphis would be my spot." "How I got to Memphis," "I still don't know now to this day..." "Interstate 40, split off east..." "Nashville." "And I got 50 miles up the road and I kept..." ""Why am I goin' up here, man?"" "So sure enough, I got here that afternoon and this one guy, he said," ""You drove all the way up here from Corpus Christi, Texas to play somebody a song?"" "I said, "Yeah." He said, "What kind is it?" "I said, "Well, it's kinda swampy." "Kind of bluesy."" "He said, "Boy, you drove a long ways for nothin'."" "This town is all country  western." "I get a phone number for Bob Beckham at Combine Music, which used to be across the street here." "And I walked in, he put on "Polk Salad Annie."" "So that's how Memphis got skipped." "Then I came to Nashville." "I love "Polk Salad Annie"" "because we grew up eatin' polk salad." "And so we felt that was the greatest song ever when somebody thinked to write a song about polk salad." "Boil it like turnip greens, make a little cornbread with it, and you eat it." "Elvis did "Polk Salad Annie," didn't he?" "He said, "Man, I felt like I wrote that song."" "He said, "'Cause I ate polk when I was growin' up."" " And as a songwriter..." " Yeah... the job is empathy." "It's like, what you're trying to do is relate stuff that happened to you so it'll be authentic." "The only part of what..." "Of your experience that anybody gives a shit about is the experience that they go, "Oh, yeah."" "That happened to me and that sucked."" "Or "That happened to me and it was great."" "I mean, I heard Bobbie Gentry on the radio, singin' "Ode to Billie Joe."" "I said, "I am Billie Joe."" "I've picked cotton, I know the river," "I know the Tallahatchie." "And I said," ""If I ever write about somethin', it'll be somethin' I know about."" "My dad liked country music." "I grew up on Porter Wagoner- Minnie Pearl-era stuff." "I remember sitting' down watching Hee Haw with him." "And it's kinda funny..." "I mean, it's like rock has become sort of more like country." "All the old punk rockers get into country music." "Just like we've got one in our band." "I mean, I guess if you really go back, like, you know, it just comes from my love of rock and roll." "They're pretty closely related." "I love the sound of those old honky-tonk records." "This trip has by far been the most fun." "Personally, I think a big part of that is our environment." "Because this studio is amazing." "And more importantly, the food, man!" "I'm not even kidding." "Like, I think having Rusty cook for us every day here, and his team, we all eat together." "Oh, yeah, that's bacon on top of the pig." "It creates that communal spirit." "Oh, my fucking God." "And everybody's really enjoying themselves." "It's really nice, it's a cool place to make music." "But on this one, it's kinda turning it into a little bit of a country song." "I know Dave specifically didn't want to do that, but it's just..." "I guess being here just infected him." "It's happened." "It's happening." "So here's my only concern with a country-sounding lead." " Right." " That it sounds country?" "Yes." "And that we're in Nashville." "We're going too far, yeah." " I mean, the only thing..." " The lead you used to do is fucking great." "When I walk into the control room and everyone has cowboy hats on and they're playing a guitar lead that sounds like it's from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly," "I get a little nervous." "It's important when we're in these cities that we remember all the history and all the music that was made in this place." "But also that we stay true to who we are and what we're trying to do." "Yeah." "What if I accidentally let go and just like..." ""Oh!"" "In pop music, producers are stars." "But in Nashville, producers have never been that famous, except for maybe four people." "Owen Bradley..." "Chet Atkins..." "Billy Sherrill... and Fred Foster." "Monument Records, that was Monument Studios." "Fred Foster built that place." "Fred Foster signed among other people," "Roy Orbison straight after the Sun deal ended." "Roy Orbison..." "Golly, man." "You just never heard anything as soulful in the world." "What was Fred Foster like?" "Great producer." "He did a lot of Ray Price's stuff." "Fred's the one that actually found the Dixie Chicks." " Fred was a brilliant man." " He really was." "He had a great eye for talent." "And he had a great ear for hit songs." "When I first came to Nashville, I recorded for Monument." "He started finding songs for me." "And I did..." "My first song was "Dumb Blonde."" "She ain't no dumb blonde, though." "Pretty Miss Dolly Parton." "How 'bout it?" ""Just because I'm blonde, don't think I'm dumb," "'Cause this dumb blonde ain't nobody's fool."" "Thank you." "That was my first chart record." "Mighty fine, Dolly." "I think Nashville is smart in the way that they're lookin' for the song." "They don't care if you're a man or a woman." "If you've got the songs, if you've got the goods, it's all about the song." "When I first moved to Nashville, we see the Bluebird and the sign in the window said" "Steve Earle and the Dukes, and I said," ""That can't possibly be this guy's real name."" "And it was some of the best songwriting I'd heard in I don't know how long." "Bluebird is a in-the-round place for singer-songwriters." "They just sit in a circle and play songs acoustically and people are just sitting basically right on top of the microphone." "It's really the test." "People are exposed, is one way of looking at it." "But also revealed." "Keith Urban, Kenny Chesney, of course Kathy Mattea," "Garth, Taylor Swift..." "So many people have stories." "Like, "Oh, well, when I got off the bus, this is the first place I came because I wanted to be a songwriter and I wanted to hear the best." "Yeah!" "I got to Nashville in November of 1974." "It was like a university for songwriters." "It was like..." "Any night of the week, somebody was in a studio or in somebody's office with guitars going around in a circle, everybody playin' what they'd just written." "It was amazing and it was rich." "Yay!" "Boy, that's really a good 'un." "What label you're on, who produces your record." "you know..." "Gear, whether you're recording analog or digitally..." "None of that means anything if you don't have songs." "Led Zeppelin's not Led Zeppelin because they were the first metal band." "That's as wrongheaded as you could possibly be." "They're Led Zeppelin because they had great fucking songs." "When Willie was cutting records in the beginning here in Nashville, when he wrote "Crazy" for Patsy, he was really a songwriter." "That was back when Willie had no hair, no beard." "He was so dorky-lookin'." "You know, he looked great." "I loved him, but he was just so..." "You'd never in a million years know it was him." "He had a crew cut and he wore suits." "And it didn't work." "You know, the art is being able to get your music in front of a lot of different people and a lot of different artists." "I wasn't very good at it." "Willie could not get the attention or the respect that he needed 'cause he knew..." "You'd have to know you're great, if you're as great as Willie Nelson." "With the songs he wrote, the way he thinks, the way he..." "He's such a stylist." "There's nobody like Willie in any way." "You know, Willie Nelson had been in Nashville for years and years and years and years and then he moves back to Texas." "While you're on your feet!" "And let his hair grow out long and just sort of became... a hippie..." "The hippie that he, I guess, he always was." "You know, he just went back to his roots and found his congregation." "Yeah!" "Willie bailed out of Nashville." "The town does not like singer-songwriters, it likes songwriters and singers." "Waylon Jennings had a hard time getting along there." "You know, Johnny Cash had a hard time getting along there." "Well, think about it, if you're a businessman and you're trying to create the finest product, the best singer is not always the best songwriter." "Do you know what I mean?" "So you get the best bass player, you get the best drummer, you get the best singer, and you get the best song." "And that..." "It's all about product, you know?" "What you get is an industry, a system with rules." "And when you have those things, you always have people that are ready to break them... or work around them." "Before Whitney sang the song, there's this story that I tell about when Elvis was planning to record "I Will Always Love You."" "And he had it all worked up and I told everybody that he was recording' it and they'd invited me down to the studio." "And so the night before, Colonel Tom had called and said, "Now, you know that Elvis don't do anything that we don't have the publishing' or at least half the publishing' on."" "I said, "Well, I can't do that, because that's my most important copyright in my publishing company."" "Elvis didn't do the song." "Man, it broke my heart." "But that's when I realized how serious I was as a songwriter." "I just held my ground, and it's worked out pretty well for me." "Nashville is a music business town." "Singles are still the driving force that make an artist famous." "If you have a hit single, then you can have another hit single." "Tim, over here!" "Just the whole machine works better when the writers were turning out songs, and, you know, really great singers were recording." "It's become a trade." "There's a group of songwriters that are the go-to guys, you know?" "And they work to get there." "They come to work every day, they lock the door and they pump out songs." "Four guys come in with briefcases, come up with a hook line and they go, "Lunch."" "It started getting like the Detroit assembly line." "And it got to where if you turned the radio on," "I couldn't pick anybody out." "And now, your hosts for the 47th Annual CMA Awards," "Carrie Underwood and Brad Paisley." "The same week that they booked to come to the studio here was the same week that the CMAs were, and it was right down the road." "So I called Robert Deaton, who's a friend of mine who produces that show, and I was like," ""Robert, I'm..." "I can get Dave Grohl to come play." "I believe I can get Dave Grohl to come play."" "I was lookin' forward to going to the Country Music Awards because Nashville is famous for its incredible musicians." "It was a little different than what I expected." "Modern country has more to do with like, um..." "It's pop music." "It's just pop music, you know?" "Little bit of a twang." "I mean, I wanted to get up there with Zac and play our instruments live the best we could and really blow people away, because in a weird way, we're both outsiders there." "Ladies and gentlemen, debuting a brand-new song called "Day for the Dead,"" "Zac Brown Band and from the Foo Fighters," "Dave Grohl!" "Dave is on my bucket list." "You know, I love seeing him sing and play guitar, but I love watching him play the drums." "He turns into a different creature." "This is how much of a badass Zac Brown is." "He says, "Would you play drums with us on the Country Music Awards a song that we're recording the day before the show that nobody's ever heard?"" "Not many people would do that." "Some people would be scared." "Most people just plain couldn't do it." "Right now, country music, it's a big machine, and it just does its thing." "I have to fight my own battles because they want tempo, got to be a party song." "Every girl's butt is called a "sugar shaker."" ""Slide that sugar shaker over here."" "I'm over it." "To stay in the business, you gotta be realistic, but I will be idealistic for the rest of my life." "Tempo, party songs, sugar shaker, all that stuff..." "If you do that, make money for the company and then you go back and regroup, go, "Okay, I'm-a get this one, I'm-a win this battle."" "So you bring that artist that's against the grain." "I call 'em "game changers."" "What I eventually discovered is that I'm drawn to the outsiders... the people who try to work outside of that system." "Tony Joe White, Steve Earle," "Willie Nelson, Zac Brown," "Johnny Cash." "People who aren't just willing to follow." "People who step outside of that conventional system and eventually "find their congregation."" "We toured six years, just me and a drummer." "And he had a little Yamaha Hipgig set that fit in, like, two bags." "Bought an old, shitty van..." ""Good Times Van" is what it was called." "But we had our CDs and we had our shit, and we're like, "We're goin' to Panama City, we're gonna freakin' make it." "Next year we're gonna be huge."" "I didn't know what "making it" meant." "We were broke." "We had this song, "Chicken Fried."" "We put on a CD in '05." "This band, The Lost Trailers, called and said," ""We wanna record 'Chicken Fried.'"" "I was like, "Well, I don't have a problem with you recording the song, but this is our song, and as long as you don't release it to radio, if you wanna have it on your record," "I'm fine with that."" "Then they get a record deal through Sony and this dude, Joe Galante, who, like, runs Nashville basically, he said, "That's the single."" "The first time I hear "Chicken Fried" on the radio, it wasn't us singing it." "It was, like, my worst nightmare." "So I call my lawyer and I'm like, "Dude, the fuckin' song is on the radio."" "And then he says, "Zac, what's the deal with this?"" "He's like, "You could get blackballed out of Nashville forever for not letting them record this song."" "And I was like, "You know what?" "Fuck that." "The dude told me he wouldn't fuckin' do it." "And then he did it." "So they had to call "cease-and-desist."" "They pulled it off the radio." "I came to Nashville to play a show at 3rd and Lindsley and there was a dude in there." "They're like, "You know who that is?" "That's the dude that's had 40 number ones with Alan Jackson and he's like, the dude..." "Keith Stegall."" "And Keith had come out to hear me play." "He sat down at the table and he's like, you know, staring down his drink." "He said," ""I had to meet the kid that told Joe Galante to fuck off."" "And that was the beginning." "There's a few artists like Zac Brown..." "They have blind faith, and they go in and cut with their band with their songs, and that's the wrong way to do it, right?" "But it works." "I love that." "You got these little niche people that can do it, because they stick to their guns." "It's not an easy thing to do." "The way you promote music, the way you make records, the way you do everything, it's completely different." "I'm just glad I got in early, 'cause I doubt very seriously if I'd started out today that I'd be anywhere close to the success I've had." "Don't have false hope." "Still have blind faith, just don't have false hope." "You know, gotta have blind faith, otherwise, why do you even give a shit?" "I mean, you've gotta have that." "You got to be true to yourself." "You've got to be writing what is important to you." "I was lucky to be able to do that." "It was the first time I heard Lightnin' Hopkins and I said, "God, man, how real can you get," you know?" "And I took Daddy's guitar into my bedroom that night." "And after that" "I never give it any other thought about anything." "Never." "So if you've got somethin' in your heart, put it out, 'cause nobody on this whole planet has wrote those words or played that lick before." "No matter if it's bad or good or it sells or don't sell." "You wrote it and you did it." "Write what's in your heart." "And if you ain't got somethin' there maybe you should go back to the cotton fields." "_" "_" "_" "_" "_" "_" "_" "_" "_" "_" "_" "_" "_" "_" "_" "_" "_" "_" "_" "_" "_" "_" "_" "_" "_" "_" "_" "_" "_" "_" "_" "_" "_" "_" "_" "_" "_" "_" "_" "_" "_" "_" "_" "_"