NEW YORK (AP) — Think about you come from a small city in Texas and you’ve got massive desires of being a rustic music star. Think about these aspirations come true, tenfold: You win a pair Academy of Nation Music Awards, a CMT Music Award and you’ve got a pair platinum singles to your title. What’s subsequent?
In the event you’re Parker McCollum, it is new challenges. Surpassing his wildest expectations meant reveling within the carte blanche that follows — the liberty to do no matter you need. For the 33-year-old singer, that is the discharge of his fifth full-length venture, a self-titled album out Friday.
“I would hang my hat on this record seven days a week,” he says of the album. “It’s just the most focused I’ve ever been.”
He is confident now, however the street to “Parker McCollum,” the album, wasn’t so regular. He initially recorded half a full-length together with his longtime collaborator, producer Jon Randall. It wasn’t working. “I was comfortable,” McCollum says. “I was like, ‘I gotta go get as uncomfortable as I can.”’
So, he scrapped what he had, went to New York, labored with a brand new producer, Frank Liddell (Miranda Lambert, Lee Ann Womack, Chris Knight), and recorded what turned the ultimate album in every week.
“It sounds absolutely ridiculous when you say it out loud,” McCollum says. “That’s a crazy way to do it, but I think it worked.”
It helped that McCollum had a lot of the songs written. “I wrote ‘Permanent Headphones’ when I was 15. I wrote ‘My Blue’ in 2019. I wrote a lot of songs last year,” he says. Nonetheless, they lower “a couple songs a day.” He credit Liddell for pulling the perfect songs out of him, in addition to New York’s industrious vitality, for serving to him notice the report.
“I’m glowing when I’m there,” he says of the town. “When I was in high school dreaming about being on a major label cutting records, you know, ‘It’s going to be in New York City and it’s gonna be … like a movie. And, you know, I just decided to try and actually do that.”
The album possesses that vigor, from the slow-building, John Mayer-esq. “New York Is On Fire” to extra country-and-then-some fare: “Solid Country Gold,” “Sunny Days,” and “What Kinda Man.”
There’s additionally a spirited cowl of Danny O’Keefe’s folks basic “Good Time Charlie’s Got The Blues” with fellow Texan singer Cody Johnson, the album’s sole characteristic. “I’ve played that song my entire life,” McCollum says.
He thought, “That song is going to be cut at some point or another in my career. Might as well make it now.”
The narrative opener “My Blue” was the primary music McCollum and Liddell recorded within the studio, and it was “a breeze,” as McCollum describes it, “And the worst factor occurred that might have probably occurred.” They thought the remainder of the method could be easy, however that is not the way it goes. “It was just an absolute emotional grind for the next six and a half days. But I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
That led to experimentation, too. “I’ve always wanted to be a country singer. And the more that I listen to what I do, I’m like, ‘This doesn’t really sound like country music to me,’ which is hard to put your thumb on nowadays, of course, what country music really is. It’s just not as narrow as it used to be. But I’m like, I just don’t really even care anymore. You know, maybe I’m not a country singer. I don’t know. I don’t give a (expletive) anymore. Whatever it is that I do sound like, you know, that’s what I wanna do.”
So long as the songs “make you feel something.”
That is one thing followers have lengthy linked to, because the launch of his debut, “The Limestone Kid,” a decade in the past.
“It really eats at me to put out music that hits you where music hits me,” he says. “I really enjoy that chase and that journey of, ‘Am I going to write songs that are good enough?’ … I’m trying to find those answers.”
