Quotes from Jay DeMarcus

My beliefs and my faith are part of who I am, and I'm so grateful that I had the foundation laid early on. My mom took me to church from my earliest memories, so I'm grateful to have had that foundation laid early, and it's just part of who I am.

I remember when 'I'm Moving On' came out, and we got the response we did, I thought, 'Man, this could be for real.' That was the first time it dawned on me what we had.

That's what we all hope and dream to do, when we stand in front of the mirror with our Goody comb and sing into it, is to have a bunch of songs that have touched people so much that they want to hear 'em every night.

We love touring. We love being in front of the fans.

I think the 360 deals are what stands out to me, first and foremost. I never would have dreamed that record labels would be taking a piece of touring, merchandise, and everything else. The world has changed so dramatically from when we first started.

I think the thing that keeps us motivated is challenging ourselves to see if we can be better than we've been before and seeing if we can stumble upon a magic that wasn't there before - whether it's a song, a performance, or a track that lights us up the way the first few records did.

Chicago was a big influence on all three of us growing up. I admire their musical integrity. When the opportunity came up to produce them, I couldn't let it go by.

So many people in this world get up every day and go to their nine-to-five job they hate for 12 months a year for 30 years. I kind of do a self-check and evaluation to realize I'm very blessed and grateful to be where I am.

You can't manufacture the feeling of being in a small crowd and connecting on every single level to the very last person in the very last row in the back. I think when you evolve into a headlining act and things get bigger, the intimacy and some of that energy gets lost a little bit.

Some of my biggest commercial musical influences would be people like Merle Haggard, George Jones, of course, Johnny Cash. People that wrote and sang their own stuff, I really admired.

It's really easy to be grounded again when you get back home, and you sing in front of 20,000 people a night, and your wife hands you the kids and tells you it's your turn to be on diaper duty and take out the trash. So it's easy to keep things in perspective when things like that happen.

I grew up in the church and loved contemporary Christian music. I go back to the early days of when it first started with the likes of Amy Grant and Michael W. Smith. Those people that really pioneered are heroes of mine.

I think it happens with every career when you've been around 10 or 12 years. You start to get on cruise control a little bit, then you freak out and go, 'Oh my gosh, we've got to change some things up.'

After 15 years of singing the same 12 to 15 songs every night, it can become monotonous.

I think our live shows dispelled any misconceptions people had about us. When you come see us live, you know we're anything but a boy band.

There were so many years that were going by at a lightning speed that it was so hard to kinda put our heads around what was happening to us.

Constantly writing with new people is important. Also, listening to new music that's popular and that's making a splash - that's how I get motivated.

I love my time with my kids.

I feel like we were so naive when we first got started, we didn't even know we'd be around for two years, given how tough it was when we were first starting out.

We were kind of young and a little naive when we first started out in the business.

When you put a new show out, you always have a few kinks that you need to iron out, and you need to dial your show in. You figure out over a couple of weeks what songs work well together and what songs may not have the impact you thought they would at that spot in the show.

When you sit there, and you sing the chorus - and then you look at each other, and everybody has the hair standing up on their arms - then everybody knows you've stumbled onto something.

I love every aspect of live performance and putting our shows together and approaching it from the standpoint of, 'What would we want to see if we were a fan sitting in the audience?'

It would be nice sometimes to take a longer break in between projects, but unfortunately, the way that the business is, there's such a demand for new material on a consistent basis that it's nearly impossible to do that.