THE DEADBOLT: If someone's unfamiliar with a certain song or artist, like Ashlee with Steve Miller, do you think there's more of a chance it'll come off as awkward?

STEELE: Everybody seemed to love it; I didn’t like her in that role. I thought she was out of her skin even though she had her shoes off. And I now that was a great thing Jon thought she was being herself. I think sometimes it can work to their advantage if they haven’t heard the song, as long as they deliver it their own way. I wish she would’ve sang it the way she’s been singing this whole time, a little bit more laid back. Ultimately, maybe she doesn’t have the hype and the hoopla to make her one of those bright shiny stars off of the show. But if she doesn’t make it through the show, I think Ashlee’s going to be a huge star. You know, she’s a few years in the making and she could have a long career. But I’d just rather see her follow what she’s all about. To be honest with you, I’m tired of hearing a lot of these rock 'n roll songs, and I’m a guy who has really deep roots in country.

But I’ve also brought a lot of southern rock and rock with my songs, so I’m not trying to be a hypocrite about it. Maybe I am, but in this show I think country music is in a great place right now and I’d just like to see that represented. I’m so glad that Gabe picked a Keith Urban song and country music is bigger than it’s ever been right now, and I really feel that I’d really like to get back to getting to represent that a little bit more. I think a night or two of it [rock] is pretty cool, but there seems to be a lot of it to me. I thought Gabe did a good job of "Wanted Dead or Alive". I wouldn’t have picked that song for him, but he pulled it off. It’s good to see him stretch. But ultimately I’d like to see them deliver more towards the format.

THE DEADBOLT: Since country music is so intertwined with life experience and the wisdom of living through painful events, do the younger contestants face a tougher challenge just by default? I mean in terms of life experience.

STEELE: Yeah, there’s no doubt. I mean there’s no doubt that you've got two girls singing "Walking After Midnight". Even if it’s something with more weight to it, but just classic songs like that. Sometimes you’ll get criticized for the arrangements you do, but you have to find something for them that represents who they are. I couldn’t see them trying to sing that song like Patsy Cline. It would just be a train wreck, you know. But yeah, I do think you have to find songs that either represent where they’re at in life or what their talent is. And it’s extremely hard trying to find those songs for an act that obviously hasn’t really lived much, hasn’t been through too much. So yeah, it’s a constant challenge.

THE DEADBOLT: It was kind of like that with Justin. He was only nineteen and everyone was taking about how good looking he was, but it made you wonder, 'Yeah, but can he sing?'

STEELE: There again, I take "The 5th" because I was the last one for the party on the show. I was the last one hired. And when I first saw him, I was like, ‘Are you kidding me? What is this show going to be?' And ultimately you see it’s TV, and you see that he’s getting votes, and he’s going on week to week. It didn’t last, but how do you respond to that? You see him getting the high votes for the week and people are keeping him on there and nothing is happening on-stage - [laughs] - and I’m still seeing that now. I’m just shaking my head and going, ‘Well, America’s voting.’ You know, we voted off Pearl Heart last night and I’m just baffled by that.

THE DEADBOLT: Well, when you know the fans are wrong about voting someone off, is it hard to make peace with that?

STEELE: You can’t call them wrong, because you know that it’s not only a talent show, it’s a popularity contest and there are a lot of variables that go into it and what makes people want to vote for what they vote for. What I’ve noticed is the more you criticize one act the more they get voted good for.

THE DEADBOLT: So it’s a spiteful kind of thing.

STEELE: It’s spiteful, and you can’t really worry about it. The first thing I thought when I saw them walking down the stairs with Ashlee, I knew Ashlee wasn’t going to go and it was just like swallowing a honey stick. And I was kind of like, ‘Oh my god, they’re going. I can’t believe that they’re going and Sophie and Laura are staying. This is just insane to me and I can’t believe that this happened.’ But in the same breath, I’m sitting there saying, ‘You know what? This is probably the best thing that can happen for them because they won’t be married to whatever the victory brings. That’s what they get. So I took the whole family on my bus last night and just sat them down, saying I’m the first guy here putting my hand up and saying let’s go in the studio and make a record, because I think that will be a huge selling act in a couple of years. They were crying horse and you tell them to get it out and get past it. You can’t blame America, it is what it is, a TV show.

THE DEADBOLT: What's the best thing that the contestants can do after they've been voted off?

STEELE: Well, you’re going to see. Like with Sophie and Laura, they can just survive their friendship if they really want to do this. They’ve got such a long way to go to really get to a serious place with this thing. It may or may not happen with them. I think ultimately winning the show is not always the biggest deal, and we’ve seen on Idol where Daughtry did it and a couple of others who’ve had huge careers, and even Miranda Lambert who didn’t win Nashville Star but had Album of the Year this year. So I think, if nothing else, they get a little bit of camera time, some face time, and they get to make a decision in their life - "Do I really want to get into this thing and do it, because this is my first failure, my first big national failure, so to speak?" As for me, I’ve had about a million of them. And they're parts that people don’t talk about, they always talk about the successes. But I’ve had for every big hit song, I’ve had I’ve had 500 failures. So you realize it’s just a springboard if they really want to do it for something else.

THE DEADBOLT: How important is it for people to realize and accept that criticism is one of the only way to get better?

STEELE: I think the acts, they realize that - we tell them. Like I told them in the very first week, ‘You’re going to get out there onstage and this crowd is going to love you guys. You got a great band, it’s a great production onstage, it’s going to look great, and you’re going to get a standing ovation all of the time. But ultimately we can’t sit there and pat you on the back every night, because we’re not doing you any justice. And we’ve got nine or ten weeks to give you a fifteen year career here, like you’ve been in the business a long time. So you’re just going to get a whole rush of "Music Business 101" and spend a couple of months trying to get you prepared for not only if you win, but if you lose what you’re going to have to face when you get out there and really try to go for it without all of this help.’

THE DEADBOLT: When you were breaking into the business, how did you handle criticism?

STEELE: Oh, man. I had many times ran out of record companies with my tail between my legs. And, you know, broken hearted, defeated and just the wind knocked out of my sails getting ready to go back to college and figure something out, that I needed to get a real job. And you just come to learn the old cliché of if you get knocked down, you just get back up, wipe the blood off, spit, get mad and figure out what you’re going to do. And if you’ve really got the talent to do it, you will do it if you just keep hanging in there. For me it it’s been a thirty year journey to get here and it’s still going.

THE DEADBOLT: It comes back to what you said earlier, that people always see the end result and they don’t see all of the hard work that goes into it.

STEELE: Yeah, they see the trinkets and all of that. And like I said, for me I had some really big records that people just say, "My god, it must be so great. You have this song, it’s the Song of the Year - it’s this, it’s that." And I go, "You know what? I wrote that song ten years ago." Ten years ago I was going, "Man, why won’t anybody record this song? I need it quick." Nobody sees that. [laughs] I don’t think anybody wants to see it, they just want to see the result. Of course, for me, I’m getting e-mails from every old friend I went to high school with and haven’t spoken to in thirty years, who wrote me off as some L.A. guy who is trying to go country thirty years ago. [laughs] Now they’re all calling to find me to go to the reunion. Oh, the horror of it all.

THE DEADBOLT: What's the best piece of advice you've ever received that still stays with you today?

STEELE: Oh, it’s the greatest. I’ve told the story a bunch, but it’s the greatest story of all time for me. Probably about twenty five years ago, I was playing a benefit show in North Hollywood, California in a world famous bar called the Palomino Club. It’s long gone now and that’s where I grew up and used to play the talent show. But I was opening the show and Kris Kristofferson was closing the show, and my dad had always told he was "the guy" if you really wanted to write songs. He was the benchmark and listen to his stuff. And I got into his stuff and he became one of my favorites. So I had this really quick window of opportunity to go get some advice. After the show, he was leaving through the back of the club into the alley and I ran out there after him. I ran up to him and introduced myself, "I’m Jeffrey Steele and I’m trying to be a songwriter - blah blah blah"

I’m going on about it and he was standing there half-cocked, you know, drunk as can be and had two girls - you know, look like hookers, could’ve been his girlfriends, but looked like hookers, one on each arm, a classic picture in the music business, getting into a limo in an alley. And I’m standing there and he looks at me with one eye kind of going over my shoulder, and he looks at me and he goes, "Never do it for the money." And he gets into the limo and he leaves. I took it to heart, and after all of these years I’ve seen all of the success come, just doing the work and not worrying about what I was going to get for it. Then twenty five years later when one of the first times I won Songwriter of the Year award, he was the guy who presented me the award. So it was a full circle thing that was so mind-blowing. It’s one of those things you can’t explain to new kids coming up. But the whole full circle deal taught me so much about what I was doing and what I was trying to do all of those years and the struggle and all of that. And as drunken as the advice was, it was the best advice I ever got.