Interviewer: Have you performed at Country Thunder (CT) before?
Michael Ray (Singer): I’ve not performed at this location of CT. We’ve performed at the Wisconsin version of CT. We’ve been looking forward to the Arizona CT. Arizona has always been good to us. Radio and the fans here have been great. There is beautiful scenery and we were able to get out of the snow in Nashville. The bad weather is happening in Nashville right now.
Interviewer: What is happening professionally now with you these days?
Michael Ray (Singer): We just wrapped up our second record. We will announce the release date soon. We are going back and forth doing mixes and mastering and getting everything right for it to be ready to go out. We are touring and supporting my new single. The new single is in the top 20 of the country charts. This is the fourth top twenty in a row we’ve had. It’s been pretty incredible. The name of the song is “Get To You.”
Interviewer: Do you know the name of the album yet?
Michael Ray (Singer): Yes, we just named the album, but they haven’t allowed me to announce it yet. It will be soon when we announce the other release. It will probably be released in four or five months. We don’t have a set date yet. It’s coming sooner than people think.
Interviewer: Didn’t you do a spot on Nashville the TV show?
Michael Ray (Singer): Yes, I did. They were kind enough to have me on it. We filmed a scene and it was pretty easy. I played myself. It was a good time. It’s too bad the show got canceled. I love all those guys. Charles and everybody on that whole set were really great. The show really helped to boom Nashville. I felt like once that show became popular everybody was curious about how Nashville really was. It was a great show and people wanted to see what it was really like.
Interviewer: Where are you originally from?
Michael Ray (Singer): I’m from central Florida, outside of Orlando. My family had a band before I came along. I was always on stage with them. I really started learning by the time I was nine. I started playing guitar and singing in groups with my grandfather and my dad all over central Florida. In the winter, a lot of grandfather’s friends lived up north and they would migrate down south to get away from the bad weather. I spent a lot of busy winters with him entertaining. I learned the craft of traditional country music that I wouldn’t have normally learned.
Interviewer: Who is your biggest musical influence?
Michael Ray (Singer): It’s pretty broad for me. I grew up on Earl Thomas Conley, Merle Haggard, Waylon and John Conlee. The 90’s artists of Tracy Lawrence and Aaron Tipton, Mark Chesnutt, Garth and that whole movement were all my influences. For me, the biggest one was Gary Allen. He blended the 90s sound with the traditional music of my grandfather’s music. I love Buck Owens and that Calif. vibe. That’s what really got me turned on to country music. Gary Allen was really my guy and my generation of country music. It was like here’s a guy that’s young who’s doing what I grew up listening to. He always had the cool tattoos and the cool voice. When I was a kid I thought ‘I wanna be that guy.’ Gary was my biggest influence.
Interviewer: Do you write your own music?
Michael Ray (Singer): I don’t write all of it. There are a lot of great songwriters in Nashville and we are out on the road a lot of the time touring and promoting the singles. The songwriters come to town with the dream of becoming a songwriter. That’s where music starts. It gets created at that moment when the ideas come from their head. When it comes time for me to cut a record, I write as much as I can, but when you have that great pond of songwriters, you reach into it. They are there pitching you songs and it means a lot when you have these hit songwriters who have worked on this ‘baby’ of theirs and they trust your career and they believe in you enough to do this ride together. It’s a cool thing. I do write though, just not all my stuff.
AXS: What would you consider to be your three favorite albums in the world now?
Michael Ray (Singer): It would be Earl Thomas Conley’s Greatest Hits, Hank Williams, Jr. Live, and this is way off from the others, but that new NF record, Perception, is great. He’s a rapper.
AXS: Dead or alive, who would you like to meet?
Michael Ray (Singer): I would love to meet Frank Sinatra, just to hear about all of his ‘rat pack’ days and how Vegas was back in the day. We’ve got ACMs coming up and we are going back to Vegas. I’ve been introduced to a couple of those cool restaurants or places that were very mob heavy back in the day. I’m really interested in that era as well as the music back then.
AXS: What do you have planned today as far as your set is concerned?
Michael Ray (Singer): The set is at 330 p.m. and we are going to just hang out and enjoy the sun until then. We don’t get to see our friends unless we do festivals like this. Big and Rich are friends of mine. John and I wrote “Run Away With You” their last single together. Also, I want to hang out with the Runaway June girls. Normally in our set, we have fireworks and bald eagles but the no-fly zone prevents that. No, I’m just kidding. We will be playing some new music off the new album. We’ve been kind of testing the new stuff. We will give everybody a teaser of the new music nobody’s ever heard.
