Scotty McCreery is still friends with, and a fan of, Lauren Alaina. The two met on Season 10 of American Idol, where McCreery was crowned the winner in 2011, with Alaina the runner-up. Although their busy careers, and different locations, keep them from spending much time together, the father of one says he still loves every chance he gets to spend with Alaina.
“She’s still like a sister to me,” McCreery tells Star City Broadcasting. “I never made the move to Nashville, so I don’t see her or too many artists that often. I’m still in Carolina. But any chance I get to see her, it’s like catching up right where we left off. I think I’ll always be like a brother to her, and she’ll always be like a sister to me. We went through that show together. Nobody, no matter how much you talk about it, nobody can truly get what it was like, unless you were right there.”
McCreery, who spends a lot of his time on the road, proudly still calls North Carolina home, even though much of his work is conducted in Nashville.
“I go to Nashville a lot, and I’ll record there, and I write there a bunch,” McCreery explains. “But home is home, and my roots are pretty dang deep here in Carolina. It’s just home, and we’ve made it work. I made it work right after the show, and still went back to school, even though I was touring with Brad Paisley. I went to college at NC State, even though I was touring with Rascal Flatts. It was really a wild time. I just figured out a formula that works for us, and we’ve stuck to it.”
McCreery will be honored by his home state later this year, when he is inducted into the North Carolina Music Hall of Fame, alongside Betty Davis, George Beverly Shea, Loudon Wainwright III, Fetchin Bones and Bill Curtis.
“It’s an honor,” McCreery says of his upcoming induction. “Really, a lot of my heroes are in there, so it’s really cool for me. If it happened 30 years from now, I would have been fine with it. To be mentioned along the names, like Randy Travis and Eric Church, and Ronnie Milsap. It’s really cool for me.”
McCreery is also hard at work on new music, which he plans to share soon. The 29-year-old has been relying on his fans to help him pick which songs will make it onto the record, seeing which tunes get the best reaction.
“We got a lot of new music we’re working on,” McCreery tells Indiana’s Journal & Courier. “For me, it’s kind of fun to play some songs that might be recorded, might not be recorded. Playing off the crowd, seeing what they think, seeing how their reaction is. It kind of gives us the gauge of what we should record and what the next album should look like. It doesn’t happen every year, because we’re not always making an album, but we’re doing that this year. So it kind of gets to be fun out there doing that.”
The “It Matters To Her” singer doesn’t know when he will release more music, but promises that the wait won’t be much longer.
“We’ll have a new song out on the radio here, I’d say in the next month or so,” McCreery reveals. “And then a new album early next year, is probably what I think. But we’re working hard on it, and hopefully folks enjoy it when it finally gets here.”
McCreery has plenty of concert dates on the calendar over the next few months. He has also been announced as one of the performers for this year’s Opry Country Christmas. Find music and tour dates at ScottyMcCreery.com.
Read ‘Scotty McCreery: 11 Things to Know About the Country Music Star’ here.
Photo Credit: Mitch Hadley/ABC Television Network
