“I needed to write this record and be on my own,” he says of what led him to end a two-year relationship and retreat inward. To that end, when he began writing the songs that would ultimately comprise Probably Wrong, McCollum felt it necessary to be alone with little more than his emotions and a guitar. “There’s nothing else I’ve ever encountered that has had as much influence on me,” he explains. “It would jerk my soul out of me,” he says of encountering and quickly becoming enamored with their music and subsequently dedicating his life to molding songs of a similarly revealing bent. Men like Townes Van Zandt, Todd Snider, Steve Earle and James McMurtry - even as a wide-eyed and innocent young man, McCollum sensed these musicians were speaking to a more powerful truth. In speaking with McCollum, it’s easy to detect the sense of wonderment and romance he still attaches to the brutally honest songwriters he first revered during his teenage years. “I was playing catch up for two years,” he says.

McCollum always wanted to be a singer-songwriter but he admits he was caught a bit off guard by the buzz around Limestone. In the wake of The Limestone Kid’s release, and its lead single “Meet Me in the Middle” finding success at regional radio, McCollum says “in the blink of an eye” his life drastically changed.” The then-22-year-old went from a life of smoking pot on his couch and passing his days strumming the guitar to traveling from one gig to the next not as a nobody but rather a revered traveling musician with a fervent fanbase. “I keep a lot of things in most of the time and I don’t want anybody else to have to deal with my shit. “I don’t talk about my feelings very often,” he notes.

There’s an inherent pain that bleeds through in the raw honesty of stunning songs including “I Can’t Breathe” and “Hell of a Year.” For McCollum, putting his most intimate thoughts and feelings to song is more of a welcome relief than an act of bloodletting. It’s also the most honest McCollum has ever been in song. The 10-track LP, written after the dissolution of a long-term relationship, is equal parts introspective, self-flagellating and transcendent.

Set for release on November 10 independently, Probably Wrong, pulls back the curtain and reveals McCollum like never before. “It just takes over,” he says of the songwriting muse and, one senses, his ever-winding, sometimes gut-wrenching journey as an introspective musician.” “I didn’t choose this life. “That’s where I find my identity,” McCollum, who broke out with the revealing and critically adored 2013 debut The Limestone Kid and now returns with his highly anticipated follow-up album, Probably Wrong, says of penning soul-baring, honest and forthright Americana anthems. That’s because for the Austin-based singer and multi-instrumentalist the end result is worth the occasional pain in the process.

McCollum says that when a particular melody or lyric or emotion is tugging at him, hell, he might just stay in his room for days at a time working it out. His was the sort of upbringing where “if you’re going to do something and you’re not going to do it one-hundred percent you shouldn’t do it all.” It’s why the 25-year-old singer-songwriter treats each song he writes with a painstaking level of dedication, reverence, respect and, as he’ll readily admit, even a bit of obsession. Parker McCollum comes from a particular type of family - the no-nonsense, hard working kind.

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