Dwight Yoakam Quotes

I live out of cans a lot. But I try to indulge only in healthy canned food.

It's meant to reaffirm the validity of that music - clean, minimalist, honest, classic music.

In the past 3-4 years I've developed a habit of keeping numerous small cassette recorders in my house and in a bag with me so that I'm able to commit to tape memory song ideas on a constant basis.

In the dark morning silence, I placed a gun to her head. She wore red dresses, but now she lay dead.

Buddy , you might think that I've lost my mind. But mister, I'd pay twice to do it one more time.

But that is a valid, continuing service that that music - which is, in some cases, 80 or 90 years old - is rendering. And proving its own timelessness.

I'm a thousand miles from nowhere, time don't matter to me. I'm a thousand miles from nowhere and there's not place that I want to be.

Control success before it controls you.

I'm really proud of it. To me, it's a movie about character behavior and the pecking order of the pack, as well as the central character's massive survival guilt.

My music is very personal. I've created it in solitude. I face a white wall and beller. I like that sound - the expression of loneliness. That's what it's all about.

Quality is timeless: It will clearly define itself.

No compression or as little as possible - that's how you get a good recording.

Musicians exist independent of any of the marketing terms or the categorization.

[My grandfather -a miner] had black lung, and he didn't talk about it much. It's almost like a combat veteran. But he witnessed some horrific things.

To me, the hook of the riff is what makes a great guitar recording. It's the backbone of the whole song. When you have a strong riff, it's the rocket fuel for the track.

In addition, I'm finishing a track for the movie 'Waking Up In Reno', but there are numerous other singers I look forward to recording with in the near future.

Film acting has been a very pure experience, because you have to give the purest form of yourself as an artist.

I think actors are at the mercy of the opportunities presented to them. So you kind of have to wait for them to choose you. My music is insular - I can choose that.

My guitars, Cadillacs, and hillbilly music Is the only thing that keeps me hanging on.

I was very fortunate in having David Fincher, the director come to me. Now I've seen the finished product, I feel that every bit of the nine months we spent on the film was worth it.

The future has a lot to do with the past.

I was raised in the Church of Christ, which was a very abstinent faith. And I just didn't [drink] - there was never anything that I found seductive enough, I guess, to have a romance with it.

I hope that books don't go the way of albums and CD, large format albums, and physical product.

Country music originates with the colloquial, rural aspects of white America. It's really, truly, rural white America's blues.

Another lesson about a naive fool who came to Babylon, and found out that the pie don't taste so sweet.

I am probably the last of a generation able to gain an education in country music by osmosis, by sitting in a '64 Ford banging the buttons on the radio.

The actual work of recording a record or making a film just requires that you consciously block the time out to do that and nothing else. That's what I do.

I don't regret any of the musical decisions I have made.

As an artist, you have to maintain focus and eliminate the distraction of second-guessing yourself based on the opinions of others.

I tried to pay some small tribute to A Man and a Woman (1966) with the recurring musical theme.

I needed to get into a nightclub and stand up and present the material that way. I needed to present it live.

I'll never quit playing country music, or at least acknowledging it, always, as the cornerstone of what I am.

As a writer, I always tend to take the liberty and the great artistic luxury of a composite form of writing.

The congregation that I was raised in was one that sang and a non-instrumental fashion. It was all a cappella singing, and so that had a major influence on me.

They both sang. My grandmother had a very haunted mountain voice and would sing hymns. My grandpa would sing but in a very, very subdued way.

I've always been just kind of consumed by my own thoughts.

Ironically, the success I've experienced at country radio has left me ostracized from pop and other formats of radio.

Music's the one thing I try not to analyze. I don't want to destroy the magic that has always been there for me.

However you arrive at the ability to ignore self-doubt - if you can acquire it or possess it or find it or discover it - move beyond self-doubt.

I like order. It allows me to have chaos in my head.

I think that we come to a greater understanding of the world we live in and ourselves through reading.

We share something in common with the fabric of the whole universe that connects us.

I embrace country music because of love, a love of what I came from.