Vince Gill On His Love For Country Music

(Radio.com) Vince Gill will be touring through the end of the year in support of his latest album, Down to My Last Bad Habit, an album that runs the gamut from blues ("Make You Feel Real Good") to adult contemporary ("I Can't Do This") and, of course, country (notably on "Sad One Comin' On (A Song for George Jones)").

Gill has stretched all over the artistic map over the course of his career, but he's glad to still be regarded as a country artist. "I owe country music the majority of my success," Gill tells Radio.com. "I still want to be known as a country music singer, but the genre has changed over and over and over.

"The perception of what country music is, and the reality of it, are two different things. Everyone has the eras that they like, and are inspired by, I certainly do. I enjoyed the era that I liked the most even more than [I liked] the era of my success. There were a lot of neat records made in my era, but the ones that really shaped what I love and what I want to do are more from my past."

And who are the artists that shaped him? "I love Ray Price and Buck Owens, west coast stuff. Merle Haggard was always my absolute favorite artist of all time, and always will be. There's still a lot of young people who are inspired by that generation. It's less and less [than it used to be]. A young kid today that's a 25 year old artist [knows] maybe 15 years of history. You look back to the year 2000, and that's been his experience, it's what he learned [from]." But he's not a "Get off my lawn!" guy. He reasons, "Everyone does what they love and [country music] changes and it evolves, it's all good to me." Read more here.

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