Jarrod,
I just did. I also explain WHY my opinions are formed. You give me information you are interested about and I give you the background on it, and why. I also fill in back story. One thing about Jamey Johnson, he is notoriously unreliable. He doesn't show up for gigs, dissapears for weeks at a time and no one knows where he is. His record company complains about not knowing how to handle him. So yes, he is different, but there are a lot of sides to that.
A few days ago, we were talking about the three minute time limit. Justin was asking about why that was and was it importance. In Texas, they are used to having songs longer than that. I explained why that was, that essentially people have a thirty second attention span. it has been that way for centuries. The "three minute wall" in songs are about as long as people are going to pay attention to, and commerical radio will play. I explained all of that. If you back up about 5-7 pages, you can find that discussion.
He also talks about the animosity of Texas toward Nashville. I explained that too. Because Texans have THEIR way of doing things, and want everyone else to conform to what THEY do. Real life doesn't work like that. And most people when it comes to songwriting and music are coming TO Nashville, not going AWAY, from Nashville.
In my OPINION (which is what all of this is), if you wanted to REALLY BE DIFFERENT than most of the songwriters and people doing this, "Write very interesting songs, that are memorable, singable, and work within the verse/chorus/verse/chorus/bridge/chorus" format that people actually want to listen to instead of turn off or walk out on. Make them tell a really good convincing story, that people can believe in and relate to and do it within about three and a half minutes that doesn't get boring. That would make you very different than around 98% of the writers trying to do this.
The rest are too busy trying to be DIFFERENT. Different is not always good.
MAB