Sometimes a song on the car radio will inspire me with a certain "feel" which I try to recapture when I get to my guitar. Then I hope that I haven't recaptured the exact same "feel" that the original song had!

Sometimes I set out to write a waltz, or a bluesy, bouncy thing. Sometimes these all come out sounding like pretty much the same song I've written many times before with different lyrics. My "voice" or "signature" is on these songs, no matter how much I try to say something different! I think this is true of many songwriters: you can pretty much tell it's one of their songs by the sound or feel or "voice."

I do have one good fiddle tune that just showed up on my fiddle one day. It wrote itself, and then I went and put my corny voice to it by writing some lyrics . . .