The 64-year-old Newman, Georgia-born country star Alan Jackson is prolific.
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To date, the artist has released 16 studio albums, three greatest hits records, two Christmas albums, and two gospel albums. He remains one of the best-selling artists of all time, moving over 75 million records in his career.
Jackson, who also boasts 66 songs on the Billboard Hot Country chart, is a platinum-selling artist and a two-time Grammy Award recipient.
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But with all this success under his belt, one might wonder, what does Jackson have to say about the world at large, about life and love and his craft, outside of music?
Here are the 20 best Alan Jackson quotes.
1. “I grew up with nothing, so whenever I got to where I could have something I felt like I needed to have everything I couldn’t have when I was young.”
2. “I’ve always stood up for country music.”
3. “The older you are, I think you realize what you enjoy and what you don’t need, what wears you out, and what’s important.”
4. “As long as I’m still able to have a hit on the radio and sell a few albums and some tickets, I don’t see that it would be worth retiring.”
5. “I think I’ve always approached making albums pretty much the same way. I’m just looking for a mixture of songs and topics that aren’t the same thing over and over.”
6. “You just write about things that happen.”
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7. “I don’t write all my stuff. Everybody always thinks that. But in just about every album I’ve ever had has been about 50-50 songs I’ve written or co-written and other people’s songs.”
8. “If anything good came out of 9/11, to me, was that people were so cynical about the world—all you hear about on the news is all the bad stuff every day, but what was refreshing to me was after that, you saw how many good people there are out there. For every one bad one, there’s a thousand good ones.”
9. “I think if you retire from touring then people think you are retired.”
10. “I think every album you have, especially if it’s done well, you feel like you’re competing with yourself.’
11. “You have to be tough-skinned and willing to accept criticism, and at the same time, just try to do music that you like and you are proud of and not just whatever you think it’s going to take to get you on the radio.”
12. “‘After 17’ is a song I wrote when my first daughter went to college, so that’s kind of where I’m at in that part of my life. If you listen to that song and knew anything about me, you’d say, ‘Oh yeah, he wrote that about his daughter,’ but I try not to write them that they are so specific that they wouldn’t apply to anybody that has a child.”
13. “I like to write sad songs. They’re much easier to write and you get a lot more emotion into them. But people don’t want to hear them as much. And radio definitely doesn’t; they want that positive, uptempo thing.”
14. “A country song is a song about life.”
15. “I am driven and laid-back at the same time.”
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16. “I didn’t realize until I was older what a huge music fan my daddy really was, and actually that my grandma played banjo at one time, and I didn’t even know that until a year or two ago.”
17. “Growing up in Georgia, I used to think people up north or out west were so different. They’re really not. They’re just regular people who live in small towns. They grow up and try to raise families and have a job and go to church and play softball. It’s that way everywhere.”
18. “My mother kept asking me, ‘When are you going to do a gospel album?’ And I’ve always wanted to do a gospel album. Everybody was going on about it, so mom started hounding me more.”
19. “You think a lot of people get to be big stars and get a little crazy, but most of the ones I’ve ever met have always been surprisingly normal, and I’ve enjoyed that.”
20. “What I enjoy doing more than anything is, I have my little antique car collection, and when the weather is pretty I like to get out one of my old cars. I have a little route I run down in the country, down Natchez Trace Parkway. The loop down through there is just really relaxing, not much traffic.”
Photo: Courtesy of UMG Nashville
