One of country music's premier singer-songwriters--with a recording career that's spanned nearly four decades--Merle Haggard [ tickets ]'s most recent album, "If I Could Only Fly," is one of his best. Signed to the Epitaph label, Haggard's new record finds him pondering what it means to be a husband and a father in his mid-60s, and working it out over the course of the album's 12 songs.

Along the way, Haggard digs up standards, covers and some stunning new originals, employing a variety of styles ranging from lullabies to honky-tonks.

LiveDaily: How are you doing today?

Merle Haggard: I’ve got a cracked rib; other than that I’m fine. I had a little household accident. I fell against a rifle and tried to block my fall and fell on my side and separated a couple ribs and cracked one and I can’t breathe very good. So I had to lay off the stage for a few days, but I’ll be all right in a short amount of time. I can talk good and everything, I just can’t hit no high notes.

You recorded "If I Could Only Fly" at Tally Studio [Haggard’s recording facility, located in Northern California]. Could you describe for me and talk a little bit about the kind of environment it's like to record in?

Well, we record in a studio much like a studio you’d find on [Nashville's] Music Row. It’s very professional--32-track, fully digital ... and I have another studio B, which is an analog studio that I’ve been using lately to record live performances. We’re located about 55 miles south of Mount Shasta and about 53 miles west of Mount Lassen in a little town called Palo Cedro. ... It’s a beautiful area, or used to be. It’s been raped pretty bad with the logging industry and things of that nature, but what’s left of it is beautiful.

People have really responded to this record. Are you surprised by how well it’s been received?

You know, I’d have been surprised if it hadn’t been received that good. I had a lot of confidence in it. I sort of made the statement a couple times: that if this record don’t do any good, if there’s not some response at all, I’m just going to go fishing, because I don’t know what else to do.

You mentioned you were confident. What about this record made you so sure it was going to reach people?

Well, since I first heard the Blaze Foley tune “If I Could Only Fly,” I knew it was a much bigger song than it had been able to come to be. It had been out 15-20 years--it’s not a new song. But I had a great deal of confidence in it being a hit song--a standard, or more of a classic, I guess is what I’m trying to say. So I sort of strung up the best songs I had around one I thought was a classic.

And it may turn out we may have a classic or two ourselves in there. So songs are strung up in a bead of continuity that sort of sprays another slice of my life into the public. And that’s about only thing I’ve ever been successful with selling, the reality of my life.

I thought it was interesting that you picked a cover song, “If I Could Only Fly,” as a song for your album and as the name of the record. What about that song resonated so strongly for you?

It’s got that sort of charisma about it [that] causes a guy to want to learn it. I’d like to say that this guy is sort of a Bob Marley--he’s a legend in Texas. I think his real name is Fuller. He gave himself the stage name of Blaze Foley. And he wrote many great songs and they haven’t all come to the surface yet. I’m considering actually putting out a little barroom live album he did himself. I’m considering putting it out on my own [label]. He’s very, very talented, and “If I Could Only Fly” is only the tip of the iceberg.

I wanted to ask you about the song "Thanks to Uncle John" [from “If I Could Only Fly”]. Was Uncle John an actual person?

Oh, yeah. My father passed away when I was nine, so they kind of shopped me around to different relatives in summer months for a couple years, because I wasn’t really old enough to be alone. One of the places I was fortunate enough to be was at the Burke house. John Burke and his family. He was marriage-related to one of my uncles, Uncle Lester. They just sort of opened their home, took me on camping trips with them. John taught me how to play the fiddle.

A really strange kink to the story is that after I put this album out and wrote this song and everything, [a relative] said to me, “Don’t you know where my dad played learned to play guitar and fiddle?” I said “No.” And he said, “What he learned, he learned from your dad.” And the chills went up my back. People wouldn’t believe that for a film if you wrote that in the script.

I’m very sentimental about those people. They were so kind to me back in those days. He taught me songs like “Rubber Dolly,” and actually showed me the blues chord E. He was the one who showed me how to put my fingers on that one, when I was 11 years old. I knew C, F, G but I didn’t know E and he showed me E. Of course, anybody who knows anything about the blues knows you gotta know E.

A lot of the songs on the album seem to be about family: “Leavin’s Getting Harder,” “I’m Still Your Daddy,” “Proud to Be Your Old Man.” It sounds like you were really thinking about what it means to be a father or a husband.

Yeah. What I think makes the album work is the honesty of the subject matter there. There’s nothing stranger, I don’t think nowadays, than the truth. For someone to just simply admit that they’ve been captured by a woman and a couple kids is somehow, for a guy like me, a big step. It’s laying a lot of things out there. “Hell, he’s happy now, let’s forget about his ass.” There was a possibility of conceiving it that way. But I felt that they might care enough about me to enjoy me being happy. Being that I was not really an old guy running around looking for someone to be with, like I was for a while, in between women. I lived a pretty wild life on the houseboat here for a few years. It was almost like the Rat Pack in Las Vegas. We had our own thing going out here.

This wonderful family, the blessings are just enormous. I had pretty great success with the “Cabin in the Hills” album--sort of the gospel side of the picture--and MerleHaggard.com has been overwhelmed with sales of that record. We’ve also been doing a lot of business out there with direct marketing. It’s wonderful time for Merle Haggard to be alive and see the opportunity like it is with the Internet.

Are you a fan of the Internet?

I don’t know. I’m overwhelmed with it. It’s here for us to deal with. You can’t run from it. You’ve got to familiarize yourself with it, to deal with it. It’s also a great tool if it works. Sometimes it works. It seems like ours is always going down.

How has touring changed over the years?

The world is changing so rapidly, like we’re racing to some period of time where everything’s going to happen at once. I’ve never seen such a rapid change. They claim in next three years, we’re going to collectively learn more than we’ve learned in the last 100,000 years. God almighty, that’s hard to fathom, but it’s really true.

... Every town looks exactly the same. You could be anywhere in the U.S.A., you couldn’t tell where you’re at. You’re somewhere close to a Wendy Burger, and the other things that sit there with it. It’s the same all the way across the United States. We’ve become a daytime society. There is no more nightlife. Nightlife is isolated to Las Vegas and New York. There’s one nightclub in Los Angeles. Can you imagine? What is going on? And the automation, the robocops are everywhere. The overkill of security at the airport. They’re shaking down grandmas and grandpas. What in the goddamn hell are we doing?

How do you feel about playing live now?

The danger and the adventure of getting to the job [is] a double-edged sword. It’s entertaining and everything, it’s not boring. But it’s awful lonely and to tear yourself away from a wonderful family like I got, and to go climb in the back of a damn little bus and go to New York. [It’s] not an enticing, appetizing way to have to live. And I have to do it several times a year. The phrase again: the double-edged sword. It’s a wonderful thing to have people want you, and it’s a wonderful thing to have a great band and to be able to do what we do. But after 40 years of it, it does become laborious at times.

I separated a rib, cracked one and wasn’t able to sing for a couple days. And God, it’s a major issue: 35-40 families directly affected, plus people that had bought tickets and had to reschedule things. I can’t get a goddamn speck of dirt in my eyes [or] the whole tour’s off. It’s a lot different than people imagine it is.

... By the time you get to these places and get on stage, it's almost relaxing to walk out there and say, “Hey, we’re fixing to enjoy this, too.” Because the music is really enjoyable. We've got a great band and a great bunch of people. I've got my own cook and I don’t need to eat in restaurants anymore. I don't eat McDonald's anymore. I don’t eat none of that crap. They don’t ask me to sell any burgers for ‘em, so I'm going to talk.

You teamed with Epitaph for this record. Did you have any trepidation about the fact that they're more of a punk label than country?

It had no effect on my thinking at all. In fact, I would be more honored to be associated with the cutting edge of these young people than this bland sort of refined, perfectly boring stuff that's playing on country radio. I can’t find anything on there. Up until about six months ago--it seems like lately there's some new guys, new kids, that sounded pretty good, and I'm going to get some more ear to it--but for about 10 years, [country radio] didn’t do anything for me. I went away from listening to the radio at all.

Why do you feel country music has declined? For a period of time some of the best songwriting was done by country singers.

Well, I think that very evidently my opinion must be pretty good, because the condition that country music finds itself in has never been worse. The proof is in the pudding. There hasn't been any music made. They've isolated this crew they thought was great, and wouldn’t allow any new talent to come in. And they wouldn’t allow any emotion to be involved in the music, and they wouldn’t allow any humor. So they pretty much channeled it and refined it to the point of total waste. And people's ears got full of that garbage and turned away. And it's hard to get people to turn back once they've turned away and lost total confidence in stations that are playing that stuff. And I know for a fact there's people all over this country that have lost total confidence in country music radio. That's the reason, I believe. The kind of music they’ve played has killed a giant of an industry called country music. It's down on its knees right now. What we need right now is a new Johnny Cash [ tickets ]. We need a new hero. We're in bad need of it.