We have to collaborate together, find these opportunities and make these connections.

We know what they're going through. We sympathize with them, ... We're still Southerners and we're still pulling together. It's all sweet tea and casseroles.

We have some great opportunities to be better than we ever were, and we're working together like we never have.

I think we've got to try our best to come together, to collaborate, try to move this budget in the right direction and get the country out of recession and start building stable, good jobs for American people.

In the process, we found we had a lot of common songwriting approaches and we seemed to collaborate well together. We thought we were writing some great tunes too, so we decided to make a go of it.

We just wanted to all work together and collaborate, and that was the main impetus informing the record. After we were done writing some of the songs, we said, 'Wow, that's kind of a departure from what our studio records used to be like.' It ended up being real interesting. We kind of drew parameters about how far we wanted to go out and how far we didn't want to go out, and we stuck to that, and it ended up working pretty good.