Quotes from Jay DeMarcus

It's so much fun to have vocal groups out on the road because we get to see them do their thing, and at the end of the night, we come back, and we all do a big thing together for the encore with 'American Band.'

We started out as a bar band. We were sometimes playing in front of 20 people.

When you first start out in the music business and hope that you have a couple hits, the ultimate payoff is to be standing in front of all those people who are singing it back to you at the top of their lungs. And you know by the way they're singing it back that it's affected their life in some way. That's the ultimate reward as an artist for me.

I was at a Dolly Parton concert when I was about 9 years old. I saw her at the Ohio State Fair, and it was my first real concert that I'd been to. I saw that crowd and how they reacted and how great of a performer she was and the band. Just the energy of the whole thing collectively really captured me.

You learn really quickly how not only to be an artist, but you also become all of a sudden the CEO and owners of a company that you have to make major decisions about that I don't think we were fully prepared for in the beginning.

My mother and father are big musical heroes of mine. I think it was because it was the first memories that I have of actually hearing music and falling in love with it and wanting to be a part of it in some way.

We've always prided ourselves on putting together a great live show. That's something that means a lot to us because our bread and butter is the live tour.

I love watching new acts find their footing. It's fun to watch them early on in their careers and get a gut feeling about who's going to be a superstar.

It caught us by surprise when people started calling us a boy band because we'd always considered ourselves pretty serious musicians.

I'm surprised at the loyalty of the country music fan. People that started out with us at 'Prayin' for Daylight' still come to multiple shows a year.

I think Christmas, for me, has always been about family, as cliche as that sounds.

If people would've heard what we were doing back in the clubs in the late '90s, they would be really shocked to find out how country our sound really was back then.

You start to compete with yourself when your catalog gets bigger and bigger... I mean, everybody wants the next 'Bless the Broken Road,' but you don't write those every day, so it's difficult.

When you get to a certain point in your career, it's easy to just phone it in, to get complacent. If you're not careful, you can stop challenging yourself.

My mom was a singer, and my dad had been playing in bands with my mom's brother. My dad married my mom, and so I was sorta surrounded by music from the get-go. Born right into it.

My faith and my beliefs sustain me through all of the craziness that this life brings.

I've been really, really fortunate to have a mother that has spent many, many long hours on her knees praying for me. And I guarantee you, I would almost bet everything I have that that has saved me more often than not. So it sustains me.

When you do an arena show, and the lights have to sync up to the sound, and the sound has to sync up to the music, and all of that - things are really mapped out, and you lose some of that spontaneity.

We were derided as a boy band, with pop music and not really country.

We were so influenced not only by country music but by the rock bands of the '80s. Our focus was to bring in something different. Country music already had a George Strait and Alabama. We wanted to put some pop music in our show.

We spent night after night out there learning the art of entertaining a crowd.

I think that anybody can go home, put the record on, and listen to it note for note, but there's very little entertainment value in that, I believe. When you give people something visually entertaining to watch along with presenting the music, I feel it makes it a lot more interesting.

We've gotten to do so many great things throughout the years. We've gotten to meet presidents. We've been able to go to so many wonderful awards shows and meet so many great celebrities.

I think our kids live an extraordinarily different life than what I lived growing up. Pretty much everything about their life is different than mine was.