And we were trying different things,
We were smoking funny things,
Making love out by the lake to our favorite song.
Sipping whiskey out the bottle, not thinking 'bout tomorrow,
Singing "Sweet Home Alabama" all summer long.
Singing "Sweet Home Alabama" all summer long.

This is a James Taylor moment and we are stuck with a piano player who wants to sound like Enya and a southern funk band that, somewhere along the line, fell into thinking Alabama is a sweet place to call home.

I tour the South, though, I do. I love touring the South. Some people up North are afraid of the South, it's weird. I'll do a show in, like, Alabama. I'll tell someone I did a show in Alabama and they'll be like, "Oh my God! What was that like?" Oh, you know, chairs, a microphone. Oh, I'm sorry, I know what you're looking for. I'll tell you what it was like. Well, I flew into Birmingham. The Imperial Wizard from the Klan picked me up at the airport. Rode to the club on the back of an old mule. Tried to get a joke out over the shouts of "jewboy go home." At the end of the night I go "Where's my check?" They go, "You're not gettin' a check. You're gettin' this bag of porkrinds." Is that the answer you were looking for, you narrow-minded fake-liberal fuck?

In other words, all I want to be is the Jane Austen of south Alabama

…I’ve lived in so many places, so I almost feel as though I’m not a native of any one place—though, I definitely consider myself a Southerner. I was raised in Louisville, Kentucky and Atlanta, Georgia. But other places in terms of writing: I’ve written about Baltimore quite a bit, even though in terms of the percentage of my life lived in certain places, Baltimore probably occupies a very small percentage. It’s just been a large part of my imagination in terms of where stories are set…

Oh I come from Alabama with a banjo on my knee,
I'm going to Louisiana, my true love for to see
It rained all night the day I left, the weather it was dry
The sun so hot I froze to death; Susanna, don't you cry.
Oh, Susanna, don't you cry for me
For I come from Alabama,
With my banjo on my knee.

gave up a really successful Hollywood career for freedom and to come to this friendly place of Tennessee.

Music’s playin’ up and down the block
Mostly Christian, Blues, Country, Folk, and Southern Rock
It’s our little piece of paradise way out here in the woods
There is always somethin’ goin’ on down in the trailerhood.

And my next dream was to record my album in the country capital of the world, Nashville. This year my dream came true. I could record this album in Nashville - it's a double album, because there were just too many good country songs that I wanted to record and we have decided to name the album Nashville.

Oh Mama, can this really be the end? To be stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis blues again?

I'm so in love with country music.

I grew up being aware that I was Southern, and that being a very important thing for me. And being drawn to short story writers, like Flannery O’Connor and Eudora Welty—the surroundings in their stories were so familiar to me, the whole Southern Gothic thing. That world only existed in that part of the country. It’s going to inform the personality of the songs. In a lot of my songwriting, I mention towns and places. It’s a culturally traditional thing in the South to tell stories.

It was a really good childhood, It was typical of the ‘30s in Alabama. Nobody locked their doors … If you did anything bad, misbehaved, your mama got a call, no matter where you were.

I was born on June 27, 1880, in Tuscumbia, a little town of northern Alabama.