Country Legend Who Lost His Singing Voice Announces First Album of Original Music in 18 Years

Country music star Randy Travis just announced he’s releasing an album for the first time in 18 years. The project features songs he recorded between 1986 and 2013.

Fans of Travis’ know that the singer suffered from a stroke in 2013 that severely limited his singing abilities. Since then, he’s released songs using artificial intelligence to replicate his previous vocals. This new project, however, was put together differently, according to the announcement made by Travis on social media.

As the post shares, many people didn’t think a major return to music would be possible for Travis. Then, Travis’ longtime producer, Kyle Lehning, found the album’s tracks in “the vault,” and reworked them.

“Lehning uncovered the tracks on this album after years of them being locked away in the vault,” the post explains. “He assembled, remixed, and remastered the recordings with Randy’s input, giving the world 12 more original Randy Travis songs and bringing back his iconic, irreplaceable voice that still holds true to this day.”

The post also shares that the album’s title track “Same Old Way”, which he wrote with Lehning, is officially out for the world to hear.

How Randy Travis Used AI to Make New Music

After Travis’s 2013 stroke left him unable to sing the way he once did, the singer used artificial intelligence to record two new singles in 2024 and 2025. The first was “Where That Came From”, which came out in 2024, and the second was “Horses In Heaven”.

At the time, using AI to create music was still a relatively new idea, and it naturally drew mixed opinions.

“We started with this concept of what would AI for good look like for us, and the first thing that came to mind was, we would give Randy Travis his voice back,” Cris Lacy, the now chair and president of Warner Records Nashville, shared with CBS. “Randy’s on the other side of the microphone, it’s still his vocal. There’s no reason he shouldn’t be able to make music and to deprive him of that if he still wants to do that, that’s unconscionable.”

Although Travis’ upcoming project doesn’t use AI like some of his previous singles, it makes sense why he would. With vocals from country singer James Dupre and the technology, Lehning was able to replicate that old-fashioned country sound Travis fans know and love.

Photo by: Jason Kempin/Getty Images