David McClisterWith four albums under his belt, a decade into his relationship with his record label, Chris Young knew it was time to push himself when he set out to make I’m Comin’ Over.
“I really felt like, you know, it is my fifth record. I’ve been on RCA for almost ten years. If I’m not gonna take that next step musically with this record, then when am I going to do it?” he says, giving us a glimpse at what he was feeling. “So I think there’s a lot of things that happened naturally that were changes, but that I didn’t set out to be changes when we first started writing for this project, like being a co-producer on it. I think that’s something that I almost just stumbled into, and it felt right, so that’s where I went.”
Chris not only co-produced the album for the first time in his career, he also had a hand in writing nine of the project’s eleven tracks. With six number-one singles and seven gold or platinum records to his credit, the 30-year-old felt so secure, he says it was easy to take some chances this time around.
“There’s just so much stuff that’s going on that’s good in my world right now that it was, you know, just pretty logical to be more creative, to play around more in the studio, and to try and challenge myself to do some stuff that we’d never done before, like having multiple guests on one project, you know. I think in the past I might’ve been a little afraid to do that,” he confesses.
His hero Vince Gill guests on “Sober Saturday Night,” while Chris recruited Cassadee Pope to lend her voice to “Think of You”– just two of his creative gambles he believes paid off.
“There’s just so many times like that where instead of going ‘All right, we’ll keep it in a box,’ we went, ‘Let’s do something fun! Let’s have somebody completely different than what we would normally bring in or do on this project, do this. And if it doesn’t work, then so be it. But maybe it’ll work and maybe it’ll be great.’ And more often than not it turned out to be stuff that was really, really cool.”
This week, the album’s first single and title track cracked the top five, with the momentum to go even higher, just as Chris’s headlining tour was extended into next year. I’m Comin’ Over is new in stores and online today.
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