I went to college in North Carolina, and that's how I learned how to play music. I learned how to play guitar when I was 12, and I was always in bands, but the first time I ever started writing my own music was being surrounded by a lot of songwriter friends in North Carolina.

With Neptune City, I could have been singing about anybody's life that grew up where I did. The town I live in it isn't that magical, but when you're growing up, you think that everything is so important.

Those situations were just taking over my entire life. It was fun to write in a way, because it helped me take a really bad situation and a really sad situation and make beautiful songs out of them. When I got half of the song written it was like, Oh, this is great. It was like the one thing that was making me happy again.

Even with Neptune City, I feel like if you strip down all the arrangements, I feel like each of my songs is always going to be, at its core, either a country song or a blues song.