Tracy Lawrence Releases Volume 3: Angelina
Country Veteran Closes One Chapter and Ponders Next Move
With Volume 3: Angelina, the third and final installment of his Hindsight 2020 series, Tracy Lawrence continues to celebrate his 30th anniversary in country music. The veteran singer/songwriter has every reason to be proud of what he’s accomplished over the last three decades, but he has no interest in dwelling on the past. Lawrence is much more excited about 2022, a year that he plans to work hard and play hard too.
“I’m going to tour heavy,” Lawrence tells SLN. “We’re also going to go to Europe with the kids and taking a couple of real big trips. My youngest daughter is getting ready to go off to college in the fall, so I’m going to work hard this year, but I’ve also got some pretty good chunks of time blocked out for the family this year. I’m really reassessing where my priorities are in life, and I want to spend more time doing the important things.”
Like other touring musicians, the pandemic caused Lawrence to have more time off the road than he’d ever had and that gave him plenty of time for introspection. “I haven’t taken that time off in 30 years,” he days. “I’ve been a worker and I had to figure out what I do with my day. I cut every tree I could cut on the farm. I bushhogged every pasture I could do and just did all that manual labor and then realized I had to reinvent my day. It was a hard transition. I had to figure out how my new normal was going to be for several months, but going back to work was just as hard after I’d been off for that long because I had to get back in the groove. That was a little bit harder because I’d never taken that much time off and I think a lot of people experienced the same thing. A lot of people struggled with it and may still be struggling with it.”
The pandemic also played havoc with his intended release schedule for Hindsight 2020. Volume 3: Angelina followed the releasee of the first two collections— Volume 1: Stairway to Heaven Highway to Hell and Volume 2: Price of Fame. “It was to celebrate 30 songs for 30 years and this last album was scheduled to be out the first of October, maybe the first of November,” he explains, “but we had COVID run through us in September—me and the kids, both my bus drivers, half my band and crew, so I wasn’t able to get back into the studio to finish and by the time I was able to get in, they couldn’t get us back in the release rotation for the distribution company so we had to push it back. I really wanted all three of these records to come out last year. It just didn’t happen that way.”
Released on January 28, Volume 3: Angelina may not have been released on Lawrence’s original timetable, but it was worth the wait. The collection not only features spirited new originals such as the title track, “Didn’t We” and “Drank Thru It” as well as new renditions of such iconic Lawrence hits as “Time Marches On,” “Paint Me a Birmingham,” “Sticks and Stones” and “Alibis.”
“I knew the second two projects I needed to showcase at least some of the bigger hits that I had so I decided to split it up and I wanted to save ‘Birmingham’ and ‘Time Marches On’ and stuff like that for the last project, which is what we did,” he says. “So that first record I co-wrote nine of the 10 things on it. The second project I think I wrote all five of the new ones and by the time we got to recording the last project, my well was a bit dry. I didn’t really want to look for outside songs, but I kind of hit the wall as far as my writing was concerned and I started to look at other things. So I found a couple of real cool things. I’m really proud of the way it turned out and I hope the fans appreciate it.”
Lawrence is particularly proud of the title track. “I didn’t write ‘Angelina.’ My buddy Rick Huckaby—that I write with a lot—wrote that one. You’ll see his name on tons of songs over the last 15 years,” Lawrence says. “He’s one of my favorite writing partners. We spend a lot of time together as we go through the writing process, but he also will throw something at me every now and then, and it grabs my attention. I love the honky-tonk stuff. This song has got a real cool Louisiana feel to it, and it’s got that honky-tonk bounce to it. It’s getting harder to find these things at publishing companies in town. I love something that’s got a real cool groove to it. This one is so much fun to play and sing live.”
In recording “Didn’t We,” Lawrence was inspired by one of his favorite rockers. “I remember telling the guys when we were tracking it, ‘I want this to have a Bryan Adams feel to it because it takes me back to when I was a kid,’” Lawrence says. “When I listen to this song, when I close my eyes and hear this lyric it, it reminds me of an old Bryan Adams record. I wanted to go to that place, so that’s kind of the inspiration we took.”
Two of the new songs on Volume 3 were written the same day. “That was a good day right there,” Lawrence grins. “We wrote ‘Who Needs You’ and ‘Drank Thru It’ it at the same time. We wrote two songs that day. ‘Drank Through It’ obviously is just a barroom up tempo little party song, not much to it, but we had fun writing it. I wrote those with Carson Chamberlain and Wyatt McCubbin.”
Tracy will be sharing new music and beloved hits on the road this year. On March 3rd, Lawrence will be kicking off his joint tour with Clay Walker in Charlotte, NC. “We’re merging our camps together, so we will be sharing the stage quite a bit,” Lawrence says. “We’ll come out and do like the first four numbers together and then one will go off the stage and the other will do two or three songs and we’ll sing some songs with each other. I don’t want to give it away, but we’re in the process. . .of working up a big encore for the show.”
In addition to touring, Lawrence will continue to host his syndicated radio show Honky Tonkin’ with Tracy Lawrence, which recently earned Lawrence and Patrick Thomas ACM nominations in the National Weekly On-Air Personality of the Year category. “We’re in the process of finishing up our eighth year with Honky Tonkin’ and if you look back to when we started this show a lot of this country that we’re playing from the ’80s and ’90s had kind of been kicked to the curb,” Lawrence says. “They were playing all the new stuff and I felt like we were getting left behind. I felt like it was important to find a place to showcase this music and bring it back to the forefront. Now everybody is doing it again, but we were the early ones that felt like there was still an audience out there for it. I believe one of the reasons that this show is so successful is that the music from the ’90s is the classic rock of our generation. I really do. The music from that era was impactful and it changed the industry. It was fresh and exciting, and I think the fans who grew up with it will always gravitate towards it.”
Lawrence has fond memories of the country music scene in the ’90s. “What a great time that was and not only for me,” he recalls. “It seemed like the music of the ’90s, there was such great comradery. We were all proud of each other when we had success. There was enough room on the charts. You were proud for your buddies when they got a No. 1 record. We all cheered each other on and it was just a great time to have been in the business.”
Lawrence is happy to still be a part of the business, but country music isn’t his only endeavor. “I’m in the process of breaking ground on a 200-acre subdivision with a partner of mine,” he says. “I’ve been involved in a lot of real estate over the years, and we are having tremendous growth here in Wilson County so we’re in the process of getting that off the ground.”
As busy as he is with work, Lawrence is also looking forward to time off with his family. “We have a show on the 25th of June in Interlaken, Switzerland with The Bellamy Brothers at the Trucker & Country Festival, so we’re going to go over a week early and stay 10 days later,” he says. “We’ll be there for a little over two weeks and I hired an Italian teacher that started at our house last week. We’re taking private Italian lessons, me and my whole family, so most of our time other than a couple of days in Switzerland will be spent in Italy. We’re going to tour all over Italy so we’re going to spend the next several months learning the language which has been on my bucket list for a long time.”
Lawrence has worked hard all his life and is now taking time to enjoy his family and mark things off his bucket list. “It’s going to be a good year,” he says. “I find I’m mentally in a real good place. I’ve done a lot of soul searching and self-assessments and gotten some demons at bay and got my life on track. The kids are good, marriage is good, career is really better than it’s been in a long time. My brand value is strong. I feel like I’m in a real good place right now.”
He’s always looking to the future and exploring new directions in his music. “I want to go experience some things that I haven’t done before and kind of get things in perspective,” he says. “One of the big things this triple disc package did is it allowed me mentally to get to a place where I’m closing the book on all this stuff from this stage in my life and I’m pondering where I go musically from here. “I’ve always been known for real hardcore traditional country, honky-tonk and crying in your beer and love gone wrong, all those things,” he continues, “and it may be time for me to make a musical change and move to a new direction. I’ve talked about cutting out in LA with Steve Lukather [iconic guitarist with the band Toto] or some different types of players and cutting different types of songs. I’m trying to figure out what that next step is for me musically because I feel I’ve done everything at this place and this closed the book for me.”
