At the ACM Awards last spring, Parker McCallum walked away with one of the night’s biggest honors, the Album of the Year trophy. He’ll compete for the same honor at the CMA Awards in Nashville next month on the strength of his self-titled 2025 LP.
But despite becoming one of country music’s biggest rising stars over the past five years, McCollum says he doesn’t care about any accolades or attention.
“I don’t care one minute about being famous or being popular or any kind of legacy or any of the shit that comes with this business,” the 34-year-old singer-songwriter, who is preparing to head overseas for his first tour of Britain and Ireland, said on a recent morning from his home in Texas. “I don’t care about any of that.”
For McCallum, it’s the artistry that matters: writing great songs, making great records, and playing great shows, these are the things that initially brought him into this work. “It sounds very cliché, cheesy and boring, but it’s true,” he says.
However, as recently as a few years ago, McCullum was ready to call it quits. In a decidedly frank and honest discussion, he explains rolling stone That he was “so fed up with himself” that walking away was his only option. He has since entered a period of regenerative personal and artistic change – a process, he says, that began with more isolated, less solo-focused recording. parker mccallum And now it is represented live from sound cityA stunning acoustic LP that they surprisingly released this month.
“I still don’t know what I am or who I am or what I really do,” he says. “But,” he says with candor about his two most recent releases, “everything I do, it it is.”
Recorded over four days in the famous Los Angeles studio that gave the album its name – “10 hours a day. No setlist. Right outside the dome. We cut 1600 minutes of music” – and features additional versions of some of their biggest hits (“Handle on You,” “To Be Loved by You”), impressive new offerings (“Till the End,” “Better Alone”), as well as re-imagined deep cuts and choice covers. live from sound city McCallum at his most intimate, sensitive and artistically impressive. For him, cutting an acoustic album with nothing but his voice and guitar was a self-assessment.
“Sure, you can play baseball on steroids,” he explains by way of metaphorical comparison. “But can you play baseball naturally and become a Hall of Famer? How good are you when there’s nothing to hide behind?”
Serving as a sister LP – at least in spirit and intent – parker mccallum, live from sound city It is a musical stark contrast to McCallum’s earlier, more flashy and heavily-produced albums, including his 2021 major-label debut, gold chain cowboyAnd its commercial-smash follow-up, 2023 never enough.
Looking back, McCallum has no problem self-evaluating his earlier work. Or, for that matter, where he was emotionally while all this was going on.
“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 that’s how you make records.’ So I go in, I don’t play any instruments, and I sing. Not really paying attention to anything as far as songwriting is concerned. None of that,” he says. “I didn’t know how much control I actually had. At any time I could have said, ‘Hey, I don’t want to make this kind of record.’ But I didn’t even know what I wanted. I said, ‘Okay, I think that’s the way we’re going to make this record.’ John found a version of me that was really overwhelming and he refused to accept it.
McCallum says in reflection that uneasiness extended to gold chain cowboyCover shoot: “It’s a little smug and it’s like, ‘Yeah, motherfucker, I don’t care about any of this.’ It is an accurate portrayal of how I was feeling at that time.”
By the time he gets to the recording sessions in 2023 never enoughMcCallum, who had been touring since he was 19 and already a millionaire before signing a major-label deal, says he was personally and creatively exhausted.
“When I reached never enough I didn’t have any songs. I wasn’t writing and was just dying on the road,” he says. “I was living very hard and very terribly.
“[The label] Like ‘we need a record’. And then suddenly we have a record. Luckily ‘Burn It Down’ and ‘Handle on You’ were on there, and they were huge songs,” he adds. “They’re well-written songs. They’re not ‘truck, beer, Sunday dress, tailgate, dirt road’ songs – of which I have none. Although the bottom line is that I still had no idea what I was doing.
McCallum’s 2025 eponymous LP was an awakening, but not nearly as complete. They began recording in Los Angeles only to finish sessions, change producers, and move to New York City for marathon multi-day sessions with new producers Frank Liddell and Eric Masse. “We just fooled that son all of a sudden,” he laughs. “Down to the nines, we’re going across the country and we’re going to make this record on a major label budget.”
He says, “For the first time in my career, I’m leaving the studio knowing that I gave it everything I had.” parker mccallum. “And if that doesn’t work, if that’s not good, then I’m no good. It was the first record I made that makes me feel the same way my favorite records do. And it’s such a crazy place I’ve been doing it for as long as I’ve been doing it.”
Now, as the married father of two moves forward with a new purpose, McCallum says his career is now about playing with the house’s money.
“My whole motto since I was 19 was, ‘I don’t want to make it for any other reason than good songs.’ I think it probably hindered some of the levels I could reach,” he says. “But I’m further along than I should have been. I’m the luckiest, most grateful son of a bitch alive.”