Vince Gill's Thoughts On Life - Southern Living.

I don't want to say that I didn't care, but I didn't. I just said, here we go. Let's see what happens. And I was gutsy enough to take off and try. Oh, it's still getting my first guitar. Nothing will trump that. I don't see how. As a 10-year-old kid, I was 10 years old, and I got a really nice Gibson electric guitar. See my folks scrimp and save and be able to pull that off and give me a great instrument like that to learn to play on. It was invaluable. A lot of kids, when they get started, they get a really bad, bad instrument that Chet Atkins couldn't play. I was lucky, and it mattered, and it was inspiring. That's all a kid needs at the end of the day is just to be inspired. I still got that guitar and that amplifier, Fender Super Reverb. I've still got them both. Man, don't sweat the small stuff. Keep them alive. That's all you try to do. Now, we've had a run of scary incidents with one of the kids, Sarah, that's been in three pretty scary accidents. One was very close to being fatal. And you just never know. So just being grateful is about as good as you can do. It's about all you can hope for. What is the most prevalent is manners, kindness, those kinds of things. People are nice to each other around here, and I love that. That's been a great thing to be a part of. I've lived a Southern lifestyle for 33 years that I've been in Nashville. Amy's a Southerner. I just like it here. I like the pace of life. I like the people. I like everything about it. I like how green it is. I like the golf courses. I can't imagine, I won't live anywhere else. I know that. So I think it really gives me a sense of place. The great thing that has happened to me is perspective and being able to say, I've been to Europe. I've been everywhere six, seven times. And just that in itself lets you see how other parts of the world might be different. But at the end of the day, we're really all the same. Mac and cheese is pretty hard to beat. I guess that's Southern food. I don't know, I think fried chicken's pretty universal. I don't think the South can claim fried chicken, can they? With a straight face? My granny made pretty good fried chicken in Kansas. I go to the same breakfast place every day. That's the meal I'm most concerned about. I can't, you know, I can't really go and have meat and threes every day. I'd weigh 400 pounds, you know, if I did that. But I go to this little Nashville delicatessen here in Greenhills, and Sherman's the cook, and he knows what I like and how I like it cooked. We're big buddies, and he always comes out and hugs me. And I know all the waitresses and waiters. And there's a counter, you know, about eight or 10 seats. I just call it Cheers with Eggs. I've always loved that. Ever since I left home, I had to have a place that was my breakfast haunt. So I built a two-story porch on the front of the house. I built a studio in here. I put two rooms together as one big room, made this studio. Just, I love messing with stuff. I said, it's just, this is where I live. I want it to be inspiring to be in it. It makes total sense that I would be into that, because that's what I do for a living. I'm always messing with stuff, always trying to make it better. So if I played this, and I can't play it, if I did that, it'd be better. Same way I am with trying to write a song, trying to find a better way to say it. Take those two words out, just use that one word, maybe, you know, three words, you know. It's just all I do. I'm always trying to make whatever it is that we're all doing. I'm just trying to make it a better experience somehow. I've always wanted to be moved by music, by a song, by a singer, by a musician. And at the end of the day, that's all I'm trying to do. I'm not trying to impress anybody, I'm trying to move somebody. Therein lies a pretty big difference. I love the emotion of music. I'm not impressed by the amount of notes you can play, or, I mean, I am, but at the end of the day, did it move me? That's all I really want. Growing up, my first memory of a hymn is How Great Thou Art, that my grandmother, Granny, played on the piano. She was a pretty accomplished piano player. I think it's my first conscious memory of music, period. Oh my gosh. Maybe whenever you come around. Wrote it for Amy when I first met her. It was just taken with how pretty she was, the smile she had, just a song of yearning and hope, and a beautiful song. She inspired it. I felt like I made it because I made a living. Wasn't much of a living. There were some mighty, mighty, mighty lean years, you know, and I'd look back on those years and go, how on earth could you have possibly survived only making a few thousand dollars a year, whatever it was, you know? But I did. It was great knowing I didn't need much, and I still don't. You know, I have plenty, and I've accomplished plenty in all of that, but my lifestyle hasn't changed that much I've got a few more guitars than I used to, and that's about it. In 1981, I had sung with Emmy Lou Harris that night, and it was a big night for me. First time I'd ever gotten to sing with Emmy. And I found out Merle was playing at a, he was doing a tour of all honky-tonks. So he was playing beer joints, you know, all across the country. And I found out about it, told Emmy, and so we piled in a couple of cars, drove about 45 minutes to find this beer joint. I got to hear Merle Haggard for the first time live at a beer joint. And just couldn't get any better than that, you know? And Merle was married to a woman named Leona Williams at the time, and she had cut one of my songs and had it out. And after he was done playing, Emmy said, do you want to meet him? I said, oh, yeah. And she carried me on the bus, and said, Merle, you need to meet this kid. He's really, he's kind of special, and I said, oh, I know who you are. You're the kid that wrote that song Leona's got out, and I said, shh. Greatest thrill of mine. When I made that first record, you know, I remember somebody played it, and I was driving down I-40 in my pickup truck, you know, a 17-year-old kid, and it was the greatest feeling in the world to hear everybody sing on the radio. It had never happened before, and I started yelling on the CB for everybody to turn in this radio station, they're playing my song, and blah, blah, blah. And people were coming back on the CB radio saying stuff, and positive stuff, and I didn't realize it at the time, but all of a sudden, I had the gift of this hope, you know, it gave me hope, and that never waned.