Well the country songs themselves are three-chord stories ballads which are mostly sad. If you are already feeling sorry for yourself when you listen to them they will take you to an even sadder place.

Everyone who knows me knows that I'm a hopeless romantic who listens to love ballads and doo-wop songs all the time.

It's true there's a lot of melancholy in my music. I don't know why I'm not a melancholy person. I've always been drawn to it. Ever since I was a kid if I had an album I would play the ballads on repeat.

You can't imagine parlor ballads drifting out of high-rise multi-towered buildings. That kind of music existed in a more timeless state of life.

I like to sing ballads the way Eddie Fisher does and the way Perry Como does. But the way I'm singing now is what makes the money.

I love theatrics and have a huge imagination: Why would I want to sit onstage and sing a bunch of ballads back-to-back?

Like the old soldier of the ballad I now close my military career and just fade away an old soldier who tried to do his duty as God gave him the light to see that duty. Goodbye.

The Border Ballads for instance and the Robin Hood Ballads clearly suppose a state of society which is nothing but a very circumscribed and not very important heroic age.