Parker McCollum

Album ∙ Country ∙ 2025

Parker McCollum

A mid-career self-titled album is often an intentional statement, if not an outright reset. For Parker McCollum, attaching his name to his fifth studio album is something of a reintroduction, an hour-long tour of the Texas-born singer-songwriter’s expansive talents and a glimpse into his still immense potential. Co-produced by Music Row veteran Frank Liddell (Miranda Lambert, Lee Ann Womack), the collection finds McCollum pushing his artistry to new places, a feat aided by stepping back from longtime collaborator Jon Randall and jetting up to New York City to record the album’s 14 tracks.

“This record that we made in New York is the record I always wondered if I was good enough to make,” McCollum tells Apple Music. “I always thought about a record like this, and I finally just feel like maybe I might’ve gotten close to something that could be that.”

The LP opens with “My Blue,” a rootsy, near-folk song following a character named Jackie whose life is marked by loss and hardship. That song, with its emphasis on narrative songwriting and traditional instrumentation, immediately announces Parker McCollum as an outlier among recent releases from McCollum’s peers, and shows him to have more in common with genre outsiders like Jason Isbell or Tyler Childers than the current crop of country stars. “Solid Country Gold,” with its chiming piano and crunchy guitar, recalls the hardscrabble twang of fellow Texan Hayes Carll, name-checking John Prine at the chorus for good measure. Below, McCollum shares insight into several key tracks.

“My Blue”
“I knew I wanted ‘My Blue’ to be the first song on the record, because I knew if you heard that song and you didn’t get it and it didn’t do it for you, then this record’s not for you. My agent the other day joked, ‘Well, if you like cocaine and suicide, this record’s for you.’ But I wasn’t trying to put them in any chronological order or get from one place to another. Anytime I sequence an album, I’m just like, ‘I just want you to go somewhere else each song.’ And I think that works. I think that’s not an easy way, but a commonly effective way to lay out the tracks for a record.’”

“Killin’ Me”
“It’s pretty different from how I wrote it, especially the scene change in the solo. You’re going to a whole other place for that solo, and then you come right back to where you were. I don’t think the band heard any of the songs on the record before we were recording them. I would just start playing them and everybody would just fall in. And everybody was really encouraged and told very sternly like, ‘Hey, play whatever the hell you want to play. Mess up, play wrong notes. If you think it’s dumb, wrong—just play and play.’”

“Good Time Charlie’s Got the Blues” (feat. Cody Johnson)
“Cody’s a lot better than I am. We ain’t even playing the same game. But I’ve just always been such a fan, and it was selfish of me to have him on that song, because I’ve always listened to that song and wanted to hear him sing it. I think he’s one of the best singers that I’ve ever heard. And his voice is so unique and it’s so true, and I believe every bit of it. I just always wanted to hear him sing that song, and so I mustered up the courage one day to text him. And then, about four months later, I was like, ‘Man, I should not have done that. I’m probably a pain in his ass. And he probably complained to his management that he’s got to sing on this dumb Parker song.’ And thank you—shout-out Cody for doing it again. But I listened to it after he’d sang it, and I was just like, ‘Damn, I was so right.’”

“New York Is on Fire”
“I had wanted to go to New York in the late fall. I wanted to catch it when that first cool, crisp air was rolling in. I just wanted to set it up and pretend like I was in my own movie for a week. And when we were flying in, the trees were electric. And I said out loud to Charlie, my keys player who was with me, I said, ‘Dude, it looks like New York is on fire.’ Then we were in the studio the first day, and we were just messing around between takes around lunchtime. I started singing, ‘New York is on fire’ over and over and over again. And Frank was just buzzed in. He was the only one in the control room listening. And he was like, ‘Hey, whatever that is, keep doing that.’”