After his reign over country radio charts across the turn of the millennium, Collin Raye returns with a new Americana album, Scars, on November 20 via BFD / Audium Nashville.
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His first full-length record in a decade fills the gaps he now recognizes from his early days as a Music City icon.
With 24 Top 10 records, 16 No. 1 hits, and a 10-time Male Vocalist of the Year nominee, Raye remains one of the great country music voices of our time. Yet, he is not ready to rest in his infamy.
Raye premieres “Never Going Back There Again” ahead of Friday’s release. He compares the “smacking groove that descends to a flat seven, but with a cool, sarcastic lyric,” to Don Henley’s “Dirty Laundry.”
Though the song is not new to the artist, he felt this album was an opportune time to re-introduce this track he co-wrote with his daughter, Britanny, Michael Curtis, and Troy Powers. A few lyrical adjustments, like changing “MySpace” to “Facebook,” brought the story up to speed. Regardless of content, the message remains: “Be careful what you wish for because if you screw up, you’ll pay for it.”
“It has a hidden sense of humor, but there’s a lesson in there,” Raye explains. “Don’t just dive in the deep end—you can stick your foot in the water first. I wanted to bring this back for the record because I feel like it didn’t get the shot it deserved back then. Groove and up-tempo songs that say something are hard to come by.”
Thematically, this selection speaks to Raye’s artistic intentions with his upcoming release. He believes 2009’s “Never Going Back There Again” did not get a fair chance because the goal was to get it on TV. Even before this work, calculating country radio was always the end goal.
The award-winning artist is thankful to Sony for their stakes in his platinum, double-platinum, and gold records that defined his country-star era. But, in retrospect, it was the songwriter in him that suffered at the hand of his stardom.
“I feel lucky to have been around when people were still buying so many records,” says Raye. “I get to hang those things on the wall for posterity. But one negative was that every artist had a formula, and country radio expected that to continue. And so there were always barriers as to how far you could lean one way or the other.”
After years of rejection sounding like, ‘Collin, that song is just too deep,’ the songwriter dives head-first into his upcoming record, the one he has dreamed of making his entire career. Scars feels like freedom to the hit-maker who has finally retired from sticking to the formula. Raye’s cohort, David Ferguson (Johnny Cash, John Prine, Charley Pride), produced the fourteen-track record. The vetted producer set the tone early on that he was only interested in cutting songs the artist wrote.
“No one had ever told me that before,” he laughs. “I’ve always been a writer, but my songs would never make it to country radio. If they were going to cut one, it was going to be a battle. So instead, I focused on my voice and instruments, and getting the crowd going.”
The emergence of Americana in the late 90s struck a chord within the multi-instrumentalist. Watching the likes of Neil Young and Rodney Crowell take the stage at Americana Fest, then the country artist who followed, Raye wondered if his musicianship could ever find a home there.
“I can’t think of a better place to be now, genre-wise,” he admits. “Moving into Americana music made me feel young again. I tapped into a hunger that I have not had since I was in my twenties before becoming Collin Raye. That young kid who was trying to find his way and had definite opinions what, musically, I’d like to accomplish.”
Now, as a 60-old-man with plenty of life under this belt, Raye sees his path more clearly. After years on the road, reliving his hits like “Little Rock” and “Love, Me,” he felt he was losing his fire.
“Thank god people want to hear those songs still,” he laughs. “But they’ve been my calling cards for too long. It’s easy to sit back and say, ‘this is what they want to hear, and this is how I’m going to play them.’ But, it doesn’t make you want to try something new.”
Three decades in, Raye points to a line in Glen Campbell’s 1975 “Rhinestone Cowboy”: “There’s been a load of compromisin’ / On the road to my horizon.”
“That sums up what it means to be successful in music, especially in a commercial country,” he shares. With only gratitude for his career this far, Raye presses forward, compromising nothing.
The artist wrote or co-wrote every song on the record, except for two songs written or co-written by his brother, Scotty. Together, they penned “Young As We’re Ever Gonna Be” and “Mama Sure Could Sing.”
“Being that we started our musical journey together as teenagers, then in our 20s we began to go separate paths, this album is truly a ‘full circle’ moment in my life,” he explains. “The timing for this is just right.”
Raye enlisted some big names to bring this album together. Miranda Lambert, Vince Gill, and Dan Auerbach. Lambert appears on the project’s title track, “Scars,” with Gill providing vocals on “Rodeo Girl.” Auerbach backs Raye on electric guitar throughout the album.
“It felt so good to sit down and write a song, knowing that there was an excellent chance we were going to record it. It was very liberating, so I’m really proud of it.”
Listen to Collin Raye’s “Never Going Back There Again,” below. Pre-save Scars, here.
