Sam Hunt Quotes

Songwriters, you have to work - you have to wait for residuals. You have to pray that the song's going to be a hit. And then a year later, you might get a check.

At 18, I got a publishing deal, so I was like, 'I can do this for real and not go to college.' When I was a teenager, my parents dragged me to a lot of songwriting conventions.

There was a period when I wrote in Nashville for Maverick and then Warner/Chappell, and it was interesting.

I feel the only way I can survive is to spend a lot of time writing songs. I have to have incredible, killer songs that also are hits, or I just don't have a chance.

Most of my friends in Nashville - almost all of them - seem to have had hits in the '70s, either as artists or songwriters or producers.

After two years in the songwriting world, I wrote 'All About That Bass.' L.A. Reid heard it and signed me as an artist.

Honestly, when I got to Hollywood I was trying to sell my songs.

There's not one Tin Pan Alley song on my record.

I am a songwriter at heart, and I feel like I would, in the future, write songs for other people. I don't think I want to pursue it for myself, for a solo career.

Good new songs are the backbone of the music industry. There isn't an artist out there who could survive without hit songs.

I've just signed a contract to make records in Nashville. It won't amount to much at first, but after a year or so, I will really be in the money.

I'd been sending out demos and CDs for years. I knew my stuff was good enough, but I was getting nowhere. Then, three people - my future manager and two publishers - happened to send one of my tracks to EMI publishing in the same week. All of a sudden, they were interested!

I write music as a staff writer for Universal Music Group, and I have since 2007. I've never talked about it publicly because I wanted to earn the right to be in the same room as the great writers I write with and not shoot my mouth off because I'm an actor. It's really important to me, and I really care about it.

'Band Played On' is a good one. Barbara Orbison, who was Roy's wife, was involved in publishing in Nashville because she oversaw Roy's publishing, and she had a company in Nashville. She had a whole bunch of writers assembled, and they got together every day and wrote, and they write for everybody in Nashville.

I moved to Nashville to be a songwriter. I found out that was a job, that someone would pay you to sit in a room with a guitar and make up songs! It is the greatest job in the world. I wrote three or four songs a day. That's what I lived for.

I didn't know they would pay you money to sit in a room and write songs for other people. I always thought that George Strait was singing a song, he made it up, and that was the end of it. But the instant I found that out, that that could be a job, I thought, 'That's the job for me. I gotta figure out how to do that.'

I came to Nashville in the early '90s, and I thought, 'OK, enough is enough. I write songs; I just don't have the backbone to show it to anybody. I want to go to Nashville and learn how to properly write a song.'

That's a lonely place when you think that nobody wants to work with you, but in reality, what it is is they're just wanting to see you get good enough to get a publishing deal or to be a professional songwriter.

The truth is, that's what we moved to Nashville to do - to learn how to write hit songs. We weren't necessarily trying to get on college radio. We're trying for mass appeal.

But I sent letters to people in the music business. And one day I got a phone call from somebody and he asked me when I was born and where I was born. And, you know, three or four days later I got a call. Someone said, you know, Yoko Ono wanted to meet me in New York. I got on a plane. And the next day I was having coffee with John Lennon.

I rarely have any contact with the artists who cover my songs.

The only way to have longevity is to have good songs.

I think the process of 'I Love It' becoming such a big song opened my eyes to sides of the industry that I'd never been aware of, which I wasn't so into.

Every single day I wrote a song, I was hoping somebody like Luke Bryan, Jason Aldean or whoever would record the song. It's tough to do because there are so many great songwriters in Nashville, and I was lucky enough to get some songs recorded before I got my record deal.

Signing with Sony/ATV was life changing for me.