I think our live shows dispelled any misconceptions people had about us. When you come see us live, you know we're anything but a boy band.
— Jay DeMarcus
When you do an arena show, and the lights have to sync up to the sound, and the sound has to sync up to the music, and all of that - things are really mapped out, and you lose some of that spontaneity.
I think it happens with every career when you've been around 10 or 12 years. You start to get on cruise control a little bit, then you freak out and go, 'Oh my gosh, we've got to change some things up.'
If people would've heard what we were doing back in the clubs in the late '90s, they would be really shocked to find out how country our sound really was back then.
I think that anybody can go home, put the record on, and listen to it note for note, but there's very little entertainment value in that, I believe. When you give people something visually entertaining to watch along with presenting the music, I feel it makes it a lot more interesting.
Some of my biggest commercial musical influences would be people like Merle Haggard, George Jones, of course, Johnny Cash. People that wrote and sang their own stuff, I really admired.
To work with one of your heroes is the greatest things you can ever hope for.
A lot of people still don't realize that, before Rascal Flatts, I was in a Christian band for four or five years, and I had the opportunity to work with some of the greatest pop musicians and producers in L.A. I learned a lot from Peter Wolf; he was one of my heroes growing up in the '80s. He was a producer of a lot legendary pop music.
I feel like we were so naive when we first got started, we didn't even know we'd be around for two years, given how tough it was when we were first starting out.
There were so many years that were going by at a lightning speed that it was so hard to kinda put our heads around what was happening to us.
It's really easy to be grounded again when you get back home, and you sing in front of 20,000 people a night, and your wife hands you the kids and tells you it's your turn to be on diaper duty and take out the trash. So it's easy to keep things in perspective when things like that happen.
We've always prided ourselves on the fact that we're a band that the whole family can enjoy together.
People would say, 'Why are you guys in country music? You look like you're in the Backstreet Boys.' We took so much heat. We always said, 'It's not about hats and Wrangler Jeans. It's about a state of mind. Country is in our souls.'
I want to be a part of bringing more visibility to the Christian music genre and give it some platforms that it may not have had before. I feel like, as blessed as we've been with Rascal Flatts, I might be able, through some of my own connections and avenues, to give them some visibility in arenas they've never had before.
Christian music was such a huge foundation for me, even as a kid, and I grew to love Christian music not only because of the musicianship, which I thought was extraordinary, but because of the message in it. It was such a huge building block of who I was and who I would become.
Country's opened its boundaries so wide that it embraces everything, and it gives everybody this new freedom to create now.
What an incredible honor for us to share the stage with real life rock n' roll icons, the Rolling Stones. There are a lot of bucket list moments that you dream up as a performing musician, and this is a pretty wild one to actually have come true. You, in fact, can get some satisfaction!
It caught us by surprise when people started calling us a boy band because we'd always considered ourselves pretty serious musicians.
You can't manufacture the feeling of being in a small crowd and connecting on every single level to the very last person in the very last row in the back. I think when you evolve into a headlining act and things get bigger, the intimacy and some of that energy gets lost a little bit.
I don't know that I could pick a better place to raise a family than Nashville.
I think the 360 deals are what stands out to me, first and foremost. I never would have dreamed that record labels would be taking a piece of touring, merchandise, and everything else. The world has changed so dramatically from when we first started.
I was at a Dolly Parton concert when I was about 9 years old. I saw her at the Ohio State Fair, and it was my first real concert that I'd been to. I saw that crowd and how they reacted and how great of a performer she was and the band. Just the energy of the whole thing collectively really captured me.
My mother and father are big musical heroes of mine. I think it was because it was the first memories that I have of actually hearing music and falling in love with it and wanting to be a part of it in some way.
I've never in my life had a cavity. Not one!
It's no secret that my favorite part of the process is making records; if I'm not making them with Flatts, then I'm out producing them on other folks.
You need to continue to find ways to engage fans to keep them excited about what you're doing.
It's always a wonderful time to be able to settle down by the fire, enjoy the Christmas tree and the decorations, and just spend time with the ones you love and surround yourself with the people that you don't get to see enough throughout the year.
So many people in this world get up every day and go to their nine-to-five job they hate for 12 months a year for 30 years. I kind of do a self-check and evaluation to realize I'm very blessed and grateful to be where I am.
We write songs that hit different people at different ages where they live.
We spent night after night out there learning the art of entertaining a crowd.
I grew up in the church and loved contemporary Christian music. I go back to the early days of when it first started with the likes of Amy Grant and Michael W. Smith. Those people that really pioneered are heroes of mine.
It's such a wonderful thing for me to be able to be in there and make music with people that I love, first of all. It's something that I'm so passionate about.
That's what Joe Don Rooney and I do. He plays guitar and I play bass - and there's no reason to call it a band if you're not gonna have the guys in the band playing on the records.
I think our kids live an extraordinarily different life than what I lived growing up. Pretty much everything about their life is different than mine was.
That's what we all hope and dream to do, when we stand in front of the mirror with our Goody comb and sing into it, is to have a bunch of songs that have touched people so much that they want to hear 'em every night.
We started out as a bar band. We were sometimes playing in front of 20 people.
I love my time with my kids.
I love every aspect of live performance and putting our shows together and approaching it from the standpoint of, 'What would we want to see if we were a fan sitting in the audience?'
I was an '80s child, so I grew up loving all kinds of '80s rock. I like R&B, too.
With a band like Shenandoah, you don't want to take things and deconstruct them to a point where you don't recognize them.
I remember as a little kid watching the Opry from the nosebleeds, so to stand onstage and be invited to be a member was really, really cool.
I think the thing that keeps us motivated is challenging ourselves to see if we can be better than we've been before and seeing if we can stumble upon a magic that wasn't there before - whether it's a song, a performance, or a track that lights us up the way the first few records did.
It was such a whirlwind for us for about three to four years there that, every time we turned around, we were pulled in 90 different directions, and I look back on that now, and they're such wonderful memories, but you kinda wish that you would've taken the time to savor them a little bit more.
I think Christmas, for me, has always been about family, as cliche as that sounds.
I love watching new acts find their footing. It's fun to watch them early on in their careers and get a gut feeling about who's going to be a superstar.
We were so influenced not only by country music but by the rock bands of the '80s. Our focus was to bring in something different. Country music already had a George Strait and Alabama. We wanted to put some pop music in our show.
I am living proof - and I know this for a fact - that you can find encouragement and strength through the message that's in Christian music, because I've lived it.
It's no secret that anybody who knows the music business knows that the numbers are substantially different in Christian music than they are in country music.
The hardest part, for me, is being in the band and knowing the way I want certain things to sound, but also having to listen to opinions, and very valid opinions, of my bandmates. So, sometimes, I'll have to have conversations with them as a producer and then conversations with them as a bandmate.
When you get to a certain point in your career, it's easy to just phone it in, to get complacent. If you're not careful, you can stop challenging yourself.
