Dwight Yoakam

The future has a lot to do with the past. ”

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. ”

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

A voice expressing emotion in a musical way moves on. It's like the finale of the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) - the world turns in on itself, as a universe unto itself, in the shape of one human being. ”

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. ”

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

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

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

I can't escape being born in Pike County, Kentucky, grandson of a miner, Luther Tibbs, and his wife, Earlene, and traveling as a child up and down Route 23 between Kentucky and Columbus, Ohio, where I was raised, experiencing life via working-class people. Nor do I want to escape. ”

It became a metaphor for the lives of the people in this film and for the Old West, for the abandonment that occurred in the early part of the 20th century. ”