Trace Adkins Quotes

The way I write my songs is that I have to believe what I'm writing about, and that's why they always end up being so personal - because the kind of artists I like, they convince me, they totally win me over straight away in that thing. Like, 'Oh my God, this song is totally about me.'

If you're performing music that is not who you are or where you're at, it is painful. It's painful for the performer and for the audience.

You have to focus hard on recording songs that you believe in.

Lyrics mean a lot to me, and I won't record a song unless I can feel it. That's something I learned from Carter Stanley. Even when he wasn't perfect technically, he got inside a song and sold it emotionally.

When you listen to my music, you're going to know that you're getting the real me, my real thoughts and feelings... I want people to be like, 'Oh, he's fresh out with his music for it to be this good.'

With songs, it doesn't matter what song it is; every time I go out and perform it, it's like the first time I'm performing it, the first time I wrote it. If it's not, then I'm not going to do it that night.

There is no way I'll ever write an album for Avril Lavigne or Christina Aguilera. I just couldn't do it. There is no way I could ever do it because my musical process is about being directly involved with whatever I'm going through in life.

If you pretend to be somebody that you're not when you write songs - and I did that on some of the early Styx albums - nobody cares about what you have to say.

I feel like trying to write a song in order to be a big hit is just not something I'm interested in because it's not going to come from an authentic place of expression.

My process of songwriting comes from a very real place: a place that when you watch 'American Idol' - God bless it, it's probably an awesome experience that these people are having, but it's not a real one.

I'm not the kind of writer that can wake up and say, "Okay, I'm gonna write a song today," and have that song be the kind I would want to record. The songs of mine that I end up liking are songs that come from real experience. They're like chapter titles in my life.

Any song I don't feel good about, I shelve. Anything you ever hear me sing, it's because I want to.

I try never to focus on the radio, just find great songs, find emotion and just write the best songs you can. I think when you get fixated on trying to do something too accurate, it becomes more washed out and less what you intended it to be. So I think each time the challenge for me is to try and reinvent a little bit.

Along with a sense of humor, my songs have to be sincere, and they have to be sung from a position of inner conviction.

I've been hugely inspired by the songwriting of Lauryn Hill and Tracy Chapman - on their albums, they really tell it like it is.

I've always thought that whether I'm writing or not, I've gotta pick the best songs, whether or not they're mine. I'm not gonna sing them just because I wrote them. I've gotta find the best songs to make the best record I can.

I don't think songs have to be like these super-#1-smash-hit-sounding songs, because I think it's more important that it's like, 'Hey! This is coming out of me. This is something I connect with. This is something that I like to sing.'

Music's supposed to come from the heart. I felt like that if it ever got mechanical, I was going to back away from it.

If you write songs and if you write music that's very sincere and very honest, it's pop music, but it is pop music with a lot of honesty and a lot of heart.

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.

Write your own songs. It helps you to mean what you're singing, which will then make it mean something to listeners.

You gotta 'be' country music - you can't just sing it.

I shall try to write a poem that is about the moment but doesn't betray things that are true to me as a poet.

As a songwriter, it's very hard to listen to music that's not coming from the heart and soul, personally.

I'm very serious about what I write and who I allow to produce the music, because I want to make sure it's a true album, and not just something pushed out there to create hype and more fame for myself.