Chris Young wants to be just like his father, Michael Harris. Although he is technically his stepfather, Young thinks of him just like his parent, revealing it’s Harris who influences him more than anybody else.
“I would say that’s probably my dad,” Young said during a recent media event, when asked who has shown him unconditional love. “Every time I talk about my dad, everybody looks at us when they see us out. And they’re like, ‘Y’all look so much alike.’ And I’m like, ‘That’s weird, ’cause it’s actually my stepdad.’ But we do. It’s sort of, not creepy, but it is sort of strange, ’cause everybody will be like, ‘You all look so much alike.’ And we’re just like, ‘Yep, sure do. Thank you.'”
Young may not be biologically related to Harris, but he is honored to have any resemblance, physical or otherwise, to Harris, who has been in Young’s life since he was a little boy.
“I take it as a compliment mainly because that’s the guy that proposed to my mom on Valentine’s Day,” Young recalls. “He had me and my sister come downstairs, and got our permission to marry my mom. And the guy that raised me, the guy who has been through a whole lot. I talk about it on one of the songs on the album … but this is a man that is extremely likable. Even if he’s gruff and is like a man’s man.
“And he loves my mom absolutely to death, and loves me and my sister as well,” he adds. “So I would say that’s where I saw that amount of love from someone. A single mom with two kids, and he was like, ‘Yep, that’s what I want to be.”
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The Song On ‘I Didn’t Come Here To Leave’ That Is Inspired by His Father
On Young’s latest I Didn’t Come Here To Leave album, he includes “Just Keep Living,” a song Young wrote with Chris DeStefano, Jason Duke, and Josh Hoge. Young drew inspiration for the song by thinking about Harris, and all that he has overcome in his own life.
“It’s basically really about what my dad has gone through in his life,” Young shares on the In The Blind podcast. “He’s had two heart attacks, the same heart attack both times. I’m like, ‘Can you pick something else? Like, stub your toe on the coffee table. Don’t do that.’ He had two widowmaker heart attacks that he survived. He got lung cancer and beat that. They cut a third of one of his lungs out. He just went, ‘All right.’”
Chris Young Hints At a Christmas Album in 2026
Young is currently headlining his It Must Be Christmas – An Acoustic Evening with Chris Young Tour. He also just released an original holiday song, “Christmas Ain’t Christmas,” plus his own version of the classic “Silver Bells.” He hints that more holiday music might be coming from him in 2026.
“We were looking at even doing an entire Christmas album, and I was like, ‘Let’s wait,’” Young tells ABC. “‘Let’s hold that until next year. We can do so much stuff at one time. Let’s do one thing at a time.”
Young’s I Didn’t Come Here To Leave is his first record on Black River Entertainment. The debut single from the project, “‘Til the Last One Dies,” is in the Top 30.
Photo Credit: John Shearer