Parker McCollum Rebuilt His Sound After Burnout — SkimNews
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- Parker McCollum won Album of the Year at the ACM Awards this past spring and will compete for the same honor at next month’s CMA Awards in Nashville with his self-titled 2025 LP.
- Never Enough became a commercial-smash follow-up in 2023, but McCollum says he entered its sessions with no songs, had stopped writing and was "dying out on the road" after living "so hard and so terribly."
- Jon Randall produced McCollum’s 2021 major-label debut Gold Chain Cowboy, but the singer says he only sang, played no instruments and did not realize he could reject the sessions; Randall captured a version of him that was overwhelmed.
- Parker McCollum scrapped Los Angeles sessions for his self-titled 2025 LP, switched producers and recorded in New York with Frank Liddell and Eric Masse; he calls it the first record that made him feel he had given everything.
- Live From Sound City was recorded over four days at the Los Angeles studio, 10 hours a day with no setlist, yielding 1,600 minutes of stripped-down versions, new songs and covers that McCollum used as a self-assessment.
- Parker McCollum says fame, popularity and legacy do not matter to him, while writing songs, making records and playing shows do; as a married father of two preparing his first U.K. and Ireland tour, he says his career is now playing with "house money."
Why it matters: The change is artistic, not commercial: McCollum says the four-day, 1,600-minute Live From Sound City sessions stripped his work to voice and guitar, while scrapped Los Angeles sessions for his 2025 LP led him to New York with Frank Liddell and Eric Masse. Those choices contrast with the production-heavy records in which he says songwriting was less central.
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