Well, somewhere there in my forties I made a commitment, almost an acclamation. I wasn't going to write songs for other people, so I wasn't going to write songs for a record, for a publishing company, in order to get other people to cut them. I wasn't going to write songs thinking about their future. I was just going to write that song at that moment, no matter what it was about. For a writer like me, it's a great place to be that I don't have to write with any conditions on the song or think about what's going to happen with it ... When I started off, I was influenced by some of the writers in Texas. The writers that I liked would write about a knife or an old train. Townes would write about raindrops on a conga drum. I've just always kind of felt better writing whatever the song would tell me to write.
- Ray Willie Hubbard, interview, Billy Reid