Parker McCollum Says He Was So “Fed Up” With Himself That He Nearly Quit Music at the Height of His Career

Parker McCollum was nearly ready to leave the music business for good. Despite producing successful albums in Gold Chain Cowboy and Never Enough, the country singer told Rolling Stone that he was “fed up enough with myself” that he wanted to leave his career behind.

The trouble started with his 2021 major label debut. At the time, McCollum, admittedly, “didn’t know what I was doing,” and was “truly f**king overwhelmed and refused to admit it.”

“I go in, I don’t play any f**king instruments, and I sing. Nothing is really being leaned into as far as the songwriting. None of that,” he said. “I wasn’t aware of how much control I really had. At any point in time I could have said, ‘Hey, I don’t want to make a record like this.’ But I didn’t even know what I wanted.”

When it came time to make his next album two years later, McCollum “had been living so hard and so terribly” that he had “no songs” at all.

Though the LP featured hits including “Burn It Down” and “Handle on You,” McCollum said that “the bottom line though is that I just still didn’t know what I was doing.”

Parker McCollum Opens Up About Finding Himself

That all changed with his 2025 self-titled release, which he made “on a whim.”

“For the first time in my career, I am leaving the studio knowing I just gave it everything I f**king had,” he said. “And if that doesn’t work, if that is not good, I am not good. That was the first record I’ve ever made that makes me feel the way my favorite records do. And that’s just such a crazy place to finally arrive after as long as I’ve been doing it.”

McCollum built on that momentum with Live From Sound City, the acoustic LP he surprised released in October.

“Sure, you can play baseball on steroids, but can you play baseball naturally and be a Hall of Famer? When there’s nothing to hide behind, how good are you?” McCollum said of the project. “… I still don’t know what I am or who I am or what it is I actually do, but whatever I do, this is it.”

Whether or not others agree with that assessment is of no mind to McCollum.

“I do not care for one minute about being famous or being popular or about any kind of legacy or any of that s**t that comes along in this business,” he said. “I don’t give a s**t about any of that.”

Instead, McCollum said, it’s writing great songs and performing unforgettable shows that matters to him, as he explained, “It sounds so cliche and cheesy and nerdy, but it’s the truth.”

Photo by Isabelle Clayton/Redferns