Country SUPER STAR and hit maker COLLIN RAYE is set to make his W debut on Thursday December 8th! Grab those tickets while they last…
Collin Raye has always been a great storyteller and he’s built a multi-platinum career bringing interesting characters to life. Who can forget the struggling alcoholic in “Little Rock” or the devoted couple celebrated in “Love, Me?” On his new album Scars, Raye is once again wrapping his distinctive voice around a compelling collection of tunes, but this time in addition to writing nearly every song on the 14-track set, Raye has also embarked on a new musical direction and has enlisted Miranda Lambert, Vince Gill and the Black Keys Dan Auerbach to join the journey.
“I’d thought about doing an Americana record for years because, to me, Americana means no rules,” Raye says. “Americana is kind of country, kind of bluegrass, kind of folk, kind of R&B. It’s anything you want it to be. I thought how fun would that be to make a record knowing that cut number one can sound totally different than cut number two and cut number three, number four, etc. And that’s exactly what I set out to do.”
Working with producer David “Fergie” Ferguson (Johnny Cash, John Prine, Sturgill Simpson), Scars is Raye’s first album of all new music in over a decade. It’s a bold musical manifesto that sees the veteran hitmaker delivering an eclectic set filled with memorable stories and engaging melodic textures. “Fergie and I talked about it and I said, ‘I want it to be just really different. I want there to be songs on there that sound like Collin Raye and what you might expect, but I want there to be stuff that no one would expect as well,’” Raye says. “The more we talked about it, he said, ‘I really don’t want to cut anything that you didn’t write.’ And I was like, ‘Wow! Really?’”
As a result, Raye wrote or co-wrote 12 of the 14 tracks on Scars. There are only two outside cuts and they came from the pen of his brother Scotty Wray (the original spelling of the family surname). “Most of the stuff I wrote was new, written just for this record, and for that reason, I’m extremely proud of it because it’s very personal to me,” says the 10-time Male Vocalist of the Year nominee (ACM and CMA). “Instead of just being the singer of someone else’s words, I’m the singer of my own words. I’ve always liked writing, but I was never prolific. I was never one of those guys who wrote two or three times a week. If you look at my Sony albums, I would always have one or two cuts on there, but I never wrote half or more of an album so this was a definite turn for me. I had to really work for this, roll my sleeves up and prove to myself that I’m a good writer. I’m really happy with it. This was such a fun record to make and I’ve never felt so creative on any album.”
That is saying a lot considering Raye has already amassed an impressive body of work. Since signing with Epic Records in 1990, Raye has placed more than 30 singles on the chart, including such No. 1 hits as “Love, Me, “In This Life,” “My Kind of Girl” and “I Can Still Feel You.” His debut album, All I Can Be, was the first of four consecutive albums released by Raye to achieve platinum certification in the United States signifying sales of one million copies each. “Little Red Rodeo,” “That’s My Story,” “I Think About You,” “One Boy, One Girl” and “Not That Different” are among the hits that have kept him busy on the road until this year’s pandemic sidelined the country touring business.