Imagine you come from a small town in Texas and you have big dreams of being a country music star. Imagine those aspirations come true, tenfold: You win a couple Academy of Country Music Awards, a CMT Music Award and you have a couple platinum singles to your name. What’s next?

If you’re Parker McCollum, it’s new challenges. Surpassing his wildest expectations meant reveling in the carte blanche that follows — the freedom to do whatever you want. For the 33-year-old singer, that’s the release of his fifth full-length project, a self-titled album.

He’s self-assured now, but the road to “Parker McCollum,” the album, wasn’t so steady. He originally recorded half a full-length with his longtime collaborator, producer Jon Randall. It wasn’t working. “I was comfortable,” McCollum says. “I was like, ‘I gotta go get as uncomfortable as I can.’”

So, he scrapped what he had, went to New York, worked with a new producer, Frank Liddell (Miranda Lambert, Lee Ann Womack, Chris Knight), and recorded what became the final album in a week.

“It sounds absolutely ridiculous when you say it out loud,” McCollum says. “That’s a crazy way to do it, but I think it worked.”

It helped that McCollum had most of the songs written. “I wrote ‘Permanent Headphones’ when I was 15. I wrote ‘My Blue’ in 2019. I wrote a lot of songs last year,” he says. Still, they cut “a couple songs a day.” He credits Liddell for pulling the best songs out of him, as well as New York’s industrious energy, for helping him realize the record.

“I’m glowing when I’m there,” he says of the city. “When I was in high school dreaming about being on a major label cutting records, you know, ‘It’s going to be in New York City and it’s gonna be ... like a movie. And, you know, I just decided to try and actually do that.”