Rising country star Parker McCollum opens up about his Texas upbringing, his family’s life working ranches, and the dream of sharing a stage with his musical hero.
You could say that singer-songwriter Parker McCollum was raised in Texas. Or raised on ranching. Or raised on ’80s country music. But no matter what lens you’re looking through, there’s no denying that McCollum was raised right.
As McCollum sat down with C&I for some coffee and conversation, he was chivalrous, polite, and disarmingly genuine. And it wasn’t an act. It’s how he wants to be remembered. “I want people to think of me as someone with impeccable manners. Someone who’s extremely hardworking and a great addition to country music,” McCollum says. “I care so much about country music, and doing it the right way and the hard way ... so that people know I earned everything I had.”
Growing up on Eddie Rabbitt, Ronnie Milsap, the Judds, Keith Whitley, George Strait, Randy Travis, Reba McEntire, Dolly Parton, and Kenny Rogers will do that to a guy. Those stars made an indelible mark on McCollum as a kid, and they’re still his inspirations today. Especially Strait. “I had every record George Strait’s ever put out. They’re so clean, so polished and so well done. I mean, it’s hard to have a record sound better than those. I want my records to sound like that: not necessarily like George Strait, but the sonic quality,” he explains.
What started as an unlikely career path for McCollum became more realistic when he was a teenager sitting in his truck in the parking lot of a Jack in the Box, too stoned to go home. “My older brother was always writing songs, and that’s really why I wanted to do it. I was always trying to impress him. So that day in my truck, I wrote a song called ‘Permanent Headphones.’ I played it for him and he was like, ‘Dude. You’re gonna be the next George Strait.’ I still remember that day so well,” he says.
So, while his nascent career may feel brand-new to some, McCollum’s been at it since that day in his teens. After signing with Universal Music Group in 2019, he accrued an amplifying list of country hits, from his debut “Pretty Heart,” followed by “To Be Loved By You,” “Handle on You,” and his most recent “Burn It Down.” His two major-label albums, Gold Chain Cowboy and Never Enough, were celebrated by his loyal Texas fanbase and the world at large. No matter where McCollum was hanging his hat, he was welcomed onto dancehall stages and eventually, into bigger and bigger venues.
Like it was for so many touring country artists, the worldwide pandemic was an extreme career challenge for McCollum. His remedy was to put Texas in the rearview mirror, at least temporarily. “I had to get out of Austin. So, I packed up my truck, stopped at our ranch in East Texas for a couple nights, and drove the rest of the way the next day,” he says of his 2021 move to Nashville. “I liked being close to my management and my team, but my soul was not right. I called [Nashville] home for two years before going back to Texas. I was glad I came. I’d lived in Texas my whole life, so it was nice to get out for a little bit.”
Now he’s back in the Lone Star State and settled into a home in New Braunfels with his wife, Hallie Ray. (He described her to C&I as “as good as God can make.”) Then there are the family ranches: Uvalde, Central Texas, East Texas, Brenham, Chappell Hill, College Station, and one just outside of Waco. His primary home is a few acres and has room enough for what McCollum calls his American muscle car addiction. From his Dodge Charger Hellcat Redeye to his Corvette C8 Z06, each car has a place in his heart and his home.
The ranching side of him comes from his mother’s father. “My grandfather was one of the greatest cowboys who ever lived,” McCollum said. “He passed away a few years ago. I was extremely close with him. He was just born a cowboy, way back in the Great Depression and, after that, he was living his American Dream. He taught me everything I know about ranching and cowboying. He had a million-dollar smile. Everybody loved Bobby Yancey. Everybody.”
After school let out every summer, McCollum and his cousins went to his grandfather’s place and ranched for him all summer. “We’d make good money working the Angus beef cattle, branding the steers, breaking horses, running cows, and spending days on a tractor slinging seed,” he recalled. That life has inspired not just McCollum’s music, but the way he sees his future now that he and Hallie Ray have a son on the way later this year.
His ranch in Uvalde is one he hopes to build on. “We have some cows there now. And eventually, I’ll start buying horses. For now, though, I’ve been using it to get away, a place to hunt along the Nueces River, and as a place to take songwriters. We call it Hit Record Ranch. We wrote the majority of my next album there,” McCollum says, admitting how tough it is to top his last four albums, two of which were released independently.
“I’m about to cut my fifth album. People say you have a lifetime to write your first album, and about two years to write your second. But I’ve never been able to force it. There’s no beer, truck, or dirt road songs. It has to be extremely genuine and make me feel something,” he said. One song he wrote recently — “Every Move You Make is Killing Me” — is one he says he’s been trying to write forever. “It finally fell out. I spend every day of my life trying to write songs that just kill me. I’ve never been a title guy. There’s no rhyme or reason for me with songwriting.”
When he’s not writing or ranching, McCollum’s on the road hitting every city he can. He concedes that he’s not the guy running around an arena and that he’d rather just play and sing for a room packed with fans. Kind of the way he saw Strait doing it in his music videos on GAC. “For whatever reason,” he said, “I saw those, and I knew I could do that. No question.” And he’s doing it. Nearly every night on his Burn It Down tour this summer.
But there’s one date he’s scheduled to play on his 32nd birthday this year, June 15, that he’s been rehearsing for his whole life. And it started with a tweet, back when Twitter was Twitter. “I tweeted, ‘How cool would it be to play a concert in Kyle Field?’ No one’s ever had a concert there,” he said of the football stadium at Texas A&M University. It holds more than 100,000 people for a football game, and about 130,000 for a hypothetical concert. “A month after that tweet, my manager calls me and says, ‘George [Strait] wants to know if you’ll play Kyle Field with him on June 15.’ I don’t think I’ll ever have a better day in this business.”
“I could cry thinking about it because I worked so hard for it. I never wanted to be famous. I just wanted to respect country music and be respected in country music. That holds a lot of weight with me.”
Listen to Parker McCollum’s music and keep up with tour dates at parkermccollum.com.
From our July 2024 issue.
PHOTOGRAPHY: Courtesy Chris Kleinmeier and Jim Wright (header image)
