At the ACM Awards this past spring, Parker McCollum walked away with one of the night’s biggest honors, the trophy for Album of the Year. He’ll compete for the same honor at next month’s CMA Awards in Nashville on the strength of his self-titled 2025 LP.
But McCollum, despite evolving into one of the biggest breakout stars in country music over the past five years, says he couldn’t care less about any accolades or attention.
“I do not care for one minute about being famous or being popular or about any kind of legacy or any of that shit that comes along in this business,” the 34-year-old singer-songwriter says one recent morning, speaking from his Texas home as he prepares to head overseas for his first tour of the U.K. and Ireland. “I don’t give a shit about any of that.”
To McCollum, it’s the artistry that matters: writing great songs, making great records, and playing great shows, the things that got him into this line of work to begin with. “It sounds so cliche and cheesy and nerdy, but it’s the truth,” he says.
However, as recently as a few years ago, McCollum was ready to call it quits. In a decidedly frank and honest discussion, he tells Rolling Stone that he was “fed up enough with myself” that stepping away felt like his only option. He’s since entered a period of regenerative personal and artistic transformation — a process, he says, that began with recording the more stripped-down, less singles-focused Parker McCollum and is now represented by Live From Sound City, a stunning acoustic LP he surprise-released this month.
“I still don’t know what I am or who I am or what it is I actually do,” he says. “But,” he notes with clarity of his two most recent releases, “whatever I do, this is it.”
Recorded over four days at the famed Los Angeles studio that gives the album its name — “10 hours a day. No setlist. Just off the dome. We cut 1600 minutes of music” — and featuring spare versions of some of his biggest hits (“Handle on You,” “To Be Loved by You”), impressive new offerings (“‘Til the End,” “Better Alone”), as well as reimagined deep cuts and choice covers, Live From Sound City finds McCollum at his most intimate, vulnerable, and artistically impactful. For him, cutting an acoustic album with nothing more than his voice and a guitar was a self-assessment.
“Sure, you can play baseball on steroids,” he offers by way of metaphorical comparison. “But can you play baseball naturally and be a Hall of Famer? When there’s nothing to hide behind, how good are you?”
Serving as something of a sister LP — at least in spirit and intention — to Parker McCollum, Live From Sound City is in stark musical contrast to McCollum’s earlier, more shiny and heavily-produced albums, including his 2021 major-label debut, Gold Chain Cowboy, and its commercial-smash follow-up, 2023’s Never Enough.
Looking back, McCollum holds no punches in his self-assessment of his earlier work. Or, for that matter, where he was emotionally when it all played out.
“I didn’t know what I was doing when I signed my record deal and suddenly I was making [Gold Chain Cowboy] with session players and a Nashville producer [Jon Randall]. I just thought ‘Oh, I guess this is just how you make records.’ So I go in, I don’t play any fucking instruments, and I sing. Nothing is really being leaned into as far as the songwriting. None of that,” he says. “I wasn’t aware of how much control I really had. At any point in time I could have said, ‘Hey, I don’t want to make a record like this.’ But I didn’t even know what I wanted. I was like ‘OK, I guess this is how we’re making this record.’ Jon got a version of me that was truly fucking overwhelmed and refused to admit it.”
That discomfort, McCollum says in reflection, even extended to Gold Chain Cowboy’s cover shoot: “It’s kinda smug and it’s like, ‘Yeah, motherfucker, I don’t give a fuck about any of this.’ It’s a perfect depiction of how my mind was at the time.”
By the time he arrived at the recording sessions for what would become 2023’s Never Enough, McCollum, who’d been touring since he was 19 and was already a millionaire before he even signed a major-label deal, says he was personally and creatively burnt out.
“When I got to Never Enough I had no songs. I hadn’t been writing and had just been dying out on the road,” he says. “I had been living so hard and so terribly.
“[The label] is like ‘We need a record.’ And then suddenly we have a record. Luckily ‘Burn It Down’ and ‘Handle on You’ were there, and those were huge songs,” he continues. “Those are well-written songs. Those aren’t ‘truck, beer, Sunday dress, tailgate, dirt road’ songs — of which I have none. The bottom line though is that I just still didn’t know what I was doing.”
McCollum’s 2025 eponymous LP was an awakening, but one that almost didn’t come to pass. He’d started recording in Los Angeles, only to scrap the sessions, switch producers, and high-tail it to New York City for a marathon multi-day session with new producers Frank Liddell and Eric Masse. “We made that son of a bitch on a whim,” he says with a laugh. “Bottom of the fucking ninth, we’re going across the country and we’re going to make this fucking record on a major label budget.”
“For the first time in my career, I am leaving the studio knowing I just gave it everything I fucking had,” he says of Parker McCollum. “And if that doesn’t work, if that is not good, I am not good. That was the first record I’ve ever made that makes me feel the way my favorite records do. And that’s just such a crazy place to finally arrive after as long as I’ve been doing it.”
Now, as the married father of two looks ahead with a renewed purpose, McCollum says his career is now playing with house money.
“My whole motto since I was 19 years old was, ‘I don’t want to make it for any other reason other than I had good songs.’ I think that probably hindered some of the levels I could have gotten to,” he says. “But I’m so much further than I ever should have gotten. I’m the luckiest, most grateful son of a bitch alive.”
