Biography

Wrote "You Had Me From Hello" after Renée Zellweger's famous line in Jerry Maguire (1996).

Favorite TV show is Friends (1994).

Is a huge Aerosmith and Bruce Springsteen fan.

His wedding ceremony lasted 15 minutes

Is a die hard fan of the Boston Red Sox and the Tennessee Titans.

(on growing up in Lutrell, Tennessee) It was a really great place to grow up. You couldn't help but be consumed by country music. It's everywhere ... but I never dreamed of being a singer as a kid.

I can't believe it. You're moving so fast -- and you can tell the fans are different somehow; but then you're back on the plane. It was so cool to see 12,000 people at the Mall of America, screaming like there was a show when it was really only an acoustic performance. But this? For a kid from Luttrell, Tennessee who thought playing The Turf (a dive bar on what was Nashville's seedy lower Broadway strip of honky tonks) was practically making it ... well, this is bigger than words. I mean, what do you say? I'm just trying to absorb it and enjoy it.

It's a given that you want to record songs people can relate to, but it goes deeper than that. You want a song to touch them somehow. You want them to live with it and let it become a part of their lives. You want it to make them remember something -- their first kiss, their first boyfriend, their first breakup. But that's past tense. You also want it to have something they can relate to right now. I try real hard to make people feel things, whether it's a fun song, like 'How Forever Feels,' or a real intense song, like 'That's Why I'm Here' or a love song, like 'You Had Me From Hello.' You try to touch different emotions. If you don't do that, I think you miss the boat.

I think "How Forever Feels" was really just an infectious song from the very opening riff. I just think it's different. Also, I've never heard another love song that mentions Richard Petty. That song really opened up a brand new audience for me. My past two albums have gone gold (meaning sales of more than 500,000), but a lot of people think "How Forever Feels" is my first single. It's odd, because I've been out there for six years now.

God works in mysterious ways. I'm certainly glad I wasn't there - and I feel terrible for all the families who have been affected by this. - He had been scheduled to film a music video near the World Trade Center on Tuesday (9/11). The shoot was canceled