WorleySSRqs comeback tour is raw, real and exciting

By John Benson

Armed with his new top 10 hit “Sounds Like Life to Me,” Darryl Worley is back in the game with a new tour, which marks the country singer-songwriter’s return to Northeast Ohio on Saturday at the Dusty Armadillo in Rootstown.

If there’s a familiar mindset or sentiment found in Worley’s work, which over the past decade includes No. 1 tracks “I Miss My Friend,” “Have You Forgotten?” and “Awful, Beautiful Life,” it’s a sense of honesty or telling it like it is. Not surprisingly, this is overwhelmingly the case with “Sounds Like Life to Me,” the title track of Worley’s new CD that is being positioned as a comeback affair.

“The funny part about it is I have had a lot of success with songs that are just about real life,” said Worley, calling from his tour bus somewhere in Tennessee. “I mean that’s sort of my calling card now, if I have one. It’s almost what people expect to hear from me, and this new song was written five or six years ago about a real-life experience I went through. I kept telling my songwriters this is a hit song idea, and we need to write it.

“Finally I told them one day, ‘Hey, if you don’t want to write this song, I’ll write it by myself, and I’ll get all the checks when they come in.’ That seemed to make them a little bit more interested, so we wrote it that day, and it’s laid around for a long time. It was even recorded by some other artists. So this time around, we cut the song, and it wound up being our first big hit after this record.”

Sensing his career was in need of not only a jump-start but also a different approach, Worley decided to fully embrace his current free agent status as a recording artist. So instead of joining another label and once again getting involved with the Nash Vegas Music Row industry, the performer paid for the recording of “Sounds Like Life to Me” the album out of his own pocket. Eventually he found a partner with independent label Stroudavarious Records, which released the unique-sounding CD earlier this year.

“I just wanted to do something different,” Worley said. “I used my road band for players this time, and that’s kind of unheard of in the Nashville scene. But I knew my guys would handle the job just fine, and we made some great music, and it has a different ring to it, if you will, because we did use fresh players that are not in the studio every day doing the same thing over and over.

“In my opinion, sonically it’s not that overprocessed, super- compressed Nashville sound. It sounds a little bit more raw and real. It sounds like just real music played by a real live band. I believe that’s something that you almost don’t hear anymore. Does it have a wart on it here and there? Yeah. We didn’t try to polish all the blemishes off, and I think that’s part of music.”

Nearly a decade after Worley released his major label debut, 2000’s “Hard Rain Don’t Last,” the 44-year-old Tennessee native said he feels as though he’s entering into the second chapter of his career. More importantly, he couldn’t be more excited about it.

“Yeah, there’s been a lot of people in this business who have come and gone since we started,” Worley said. “And I think to some extent we were out of the thick of things for long enough that a lot of people probably thought we were history. Then we started planning this resurrection or this comeback tour. It’s really a blast when you work hard and put something back together, and you see it come to fruition. It’s a really cool feeling, and I feel like we deserve our success.

“To me it’s a testament that there’s still a lot of people, especially out there at radio, that still believe Darryl Worley and his bunch make pretty good music. They’re willing to give us a shot. And that’s a good thing.”