Fresh off his co-hosting duties at the 18th Academy of Country Music Honors (ACM Honors), in which he co-hosted alongside Carly Pearce, Russell Dickerson has officially released his brand-new album entitled Famous Back Home. This collection, out today, Friday (Aug. 22) via Triple Tigers, serves as the country singer/songwriter’s follow-up to albums —Yours, Southern Symphony, and the self-titled Russell Dickerson.
Before releasing Famous Back Home, Dickerson set the stage for his new project with preview tracks, “Sippin’ On Top Of The World,” “Heard It In A Country Song” (the first two outside cuts of his career), “Bones,” “Famous Back Home,” “Worth Your Wild,” and “Happen To Me,” the latter of which marked his biggest streaming debut to date, surpassing over 120M streams. The song also took TikTok by storm, sparking a viral dance craze seen around the country.
Dickerson says it was the success of “Happen To Me,” co-written with Chase McGill, Jessie Jo Dillon, Chris LaCorte, and Robert Hazard (writer of the Cyndi Lauper hit “Girls Just Want To Have Fun”) that validated him trusting his gut for the record.
“I’m like…We did it. I don’t even think there’s an acoustic guitar in there. It’s electric, eighties electric guitars with big old reverb drums. Who cares? Man, I think it’s awesome. Is it country? A little bit of a storyline. I dunno. Just trusting that instinct of how far to go, where to go,” he said during a round robin with Music Mayhem and other media. “…. I remember being in a studio, and I was like, y’all, if you give me some Nashville studio band BS, you know what I mean? I’m like, get into it, lean into it. Let’s get it rowdy. Let’s make this thing rambunctious. I want you to hit the drums harder. I want you to turn the gain up a little bit. And there was just that touch of, like, I’m just going to do what I want and what I think sounds awesome and not try to ring the bell with another number one country song.”
With that mentality, Famous Back Home has brought Dickerson full circle, back in the driver’s seat, so to speak, where he wasn’t just handing off his talents to top producers to come up with the sound for the project.
“I think… about my first record a lot… I mean, I was in my twenties with my first album. Just the freedom or lack of resources, maybe where my producer is in his basement shredding guitar solos, and I’ve got a blanket over my head recording vocals, and all that stuff was so fun. That record was so fun to make,” Dickerson said. “Just going back to that freedom and that confidence, maybe albums two and three may have been a little conservative. And I was more worried about feeding the fans or radio or the world something that I thought they wanted as opposed to me creating my art from a pure place of songwriting, from a pure place of my musical talents. So I’m just trusting all my instincts again as opposed to handing that off to his producers.”
“With album one, I was hands-on with everything. I played the ‘Yours’ guitar solo. I played every little singing guitar solo, I played the ‘MGNO’ guitar, and I have my hands on everything. And this is the first album since the first that I’ve gone back and gotten my hands dirty and gotten in there. So that one specifically was super fun to dive into,” he added of his current release co-produced alongside Josh Kerr, plus Casey Brown and Chris LaCorte on select songs. “I feel like I have a very wide range of genre influence [on this album], and that’s what I didn’t hold back on. I’m not the most country dude, and that’s okay. I don’t have to have an album that sounds like X, Y, Z, right? That’s the full circle moment. I feel like I’ve just come back to it, just, this is what you’re going to get.”
On Famous Back Home, Dickerson said he paid attention to the sequencing of the album, unlike his previous collections, which found him visualizing more toward the live concert aspect.
“This is the album I’ve spent the most on sequencing the songs,” he confirmed. “I think for me it was more about keeping the energy up front… If I were listening to a record, I would want the bangers to go, boom, boom, boom. So we start with ‘Dust,’ which is not all the way up here, but then ‘Sippin’ On Top Of The World,’ ‘Happen To Me’ and ‘Worth Your Wild’ kick in, and it’s like, ‘Oh, it’s up again.’ Then I feel like we came down on ‘Never Leave’ with two guitars and Vince Gill. … .that was my mindset behind sequencing it…. I hope people put this record in and their heart rate gets kicked up, endorphins kick in, but they also hear ‘Bones’ and it’s like whoa, reinvigorating love and enjoyment and the joys of everyday family life that can seem so monotonous and overbearing.”
When listening to the album front to back, folks will find that Dickerson concentrated heavily on placement, putting the sentimental tracks on the back half of the record, and giving fans a dozen solid tunes that feature him not only as a showman but also as a family man.
The flow of the album makes the project cohesive, but it’s the closer, which also serves as the title track, that ties everything together when it comes to highlighting the husband and father portions of Famous Back Home. Dickerson says he had the title for the album in his back pocket for a while, but he wasn’t quite sure how he would use it until the song “Famous Back Home” came to fruition. That’s when he realized his two sons, Remington Edward (born September 10, 2020) and Radford Arthur (born October 1, 2023), would play a role in the involvement of the project.
“You never know, going into a write, if it’s going to be a good one, right? So I was hoping I saved that title, which was my wife’s title by the way, saved that for the people I could trust the most — Casey Brown and Parker Welling,” Dickerson noted. “…I had a feeling that it was headed in that direction, but the initial idea was more so, do we go back to my hometown and that’s where we shoot it, and this and that? After we wrote the song, it solidified that the kids are going to be involved in this whole shoot. We had a wardrobe, but jeans and a T-shirt. I just wanted to feel as genuine as possible after we had written that song.”
“Famous Back Home” finds Dickerson leaning into his role as a dad and being the biggest inspiration to his wife and kids. Instead of being a superstar on stage in front of thousands of fans, he shares his gratitude for having a family that loves him to come home to in the sentimental lyrics.
“I look around and I guess I went out and did it,” Dickerson sings. “‘Cause now it’s / Hey baby, can’t wait to kiss you / Look, Daddy, I lost my first tooth / Around here a Charcoal Shearer and The Blessing’s how I’m known / It’s paper planes and tire swings spinnin’ / A slow dance alone in the kitchen / A little hallway hall of fame / With four faces framed in gold / I’m livin’ the dream / I’m a household name / Yeah, I’m famous back home.”
“The title Famous Back Home ties into this question of when you first start, it’s like, I’m going to make Union City proud. I make Franklin, Tennessee, proud, I want to make my family, friends, and all that,” Dickerson, a Union City native, reflects. “And then as you start progressing, kids change everything, anyone with kids knows that. Your priorities change. It’s like, we’re going to have to spend all this extra money on the tour bus that is just for our family, otherwise we’re never going to see each other. It’s all about learning the lessons of that sacrifice. That’s what keeps me grounded: if I ever prioritize this over the wellness and health of my family, it’s off. So being able to learn little mistakes at a time, I feel like God’s always taught me little lessons instead of big lessons, just little things instead of giant catastrophes that I’ve screwed up my entire life. Just little things along the way that just help me stay focused on, obviously, what matters to being famous back home.”
Letting folks in on his home life includes sharing insight into his world with kids, specifically, with the cover art for the project, which features Dickerson standing in front of his house with various outdoor toddler toys and equipment around him.
“The further down this road I get, the more real I want to be,” the singer/songwriter and chart-topping country artist shares. “It is crazy because we basically tore down our home almost, and we’re renovating, so we’re, I mean, we’re in two bedrooms right now, and I still have my studio set up, so we’re in my studio house that I’ve rented. That’s where we shot that album cover for this album in the front yard. There were toys that were, I mean, we did move ’em a little bit. They were already in the yard.”
Showcasing his most authentic side is something Dickerson says he wants his kids to pick up on.
“I hope that’s something they learn is trusting who we have, hopefully raising them to be amazing humans — and trusting that they go out there into the world with confidence and leadership. I sometimes feel like I was raised to care too much about what people think, and that’s probably one of my biggest things, [and] I want to try to raise them in not giving a crap what people think,” he said. “This industry is even 10 times harder because the more people that approve of you, the more successful you are, and you’re already struggling with that before you even get into this industry. I would hope that that generational thing stops with me and I can raise them to be confident in who they are and not look left or right for approval or validation.”
Dickerson’s influence on his kids also applies to the songs that he puts on his records.
“They’re going to hear ’em when they’re 16 and 17, so I try not to give too much away, try to be a good influence,” he said of his boys, who are 4 and 1. “It is my responsibility to know that this music is going to be out there forever. And so I don’t want ’em to look back whenever they are, whatever, 20 years, 25, 30, whatever, and hear just debauchery from a catalog.”
For Dickerson, it’s not the sentimental tracks that his kids are drawn to, at the moment. He says, “They love the bangers, but there were other songs that didn’t make the record that probably were uptempo and exciting. Radford, our youngest, who’s almost two, either he’s into it, he’s in his car seat flailing and jamming, or he’s completely still. He’s my No. 1 A & R. And so, those songs did pass the Rad Man Test that are more uptempo ones on the record.”
Uptempo cuts include the first five tracks, which contain the opener, “Dust,” written alongside Josh Kerr and John Byron.
“We were riding on the bus and beating our heads against the wall on a song we were writing,” Dickerson recalled of co-penning the tune that serves as a nod to David Lee Murphy’s “Dust on the Bottle” smash. “ I was just like, all right, whatever, move capo, mix everything up, change up the energy. And it was literally out of nowhere. John Byron, amazing songwriter, he just had the chorus written, and we were both kind of vibing back and forth, and it was like, oh, line, line, line…. Then you just take a memory or relationship and pull little bits and pieces from those memories and relationships, and not just mine, either. Maybe John, maybe Josh, whatever. And it just turned into a cool summer love kind of nostalgic thing.”
“Worth Your Wild,” the fourth track in the 12-song debut, meanwhile, throws it back to nostalgia with elements taken from Blink 182 to The Red Hot Chili Peppers.
“‘Worth Your Wild.’ That was in the press release we did. It was like Chili Peppers, Blink [182], heavy guitars, 1975, the super chorusy signature [guitar] lick stuff. I’m like, that’s what I think is awesome. And then mixing that in with the country sauce and the Friday night,” Dickerson noted. “ I mean, we’re not reinventing the wheel here with this song, but sonically, I would say it pushed boundaries. I haven’t heard country songs that sound like that. And so that was so fun. I wrote that at the beach with Casey Brown and Parker Welling. We wrote that and ‘Famous Back Home’ the same day. I was like, Casey, pull up some mad huge guitar sounds. And we just started riffing and doing the opt-in pedal down, and just because he is a metal kid too, and so it’s like, I just want something that’s so vibey and a little heavier and groovy. And we just kind of cooked that up.”
Subtle nods to those bands helped shape Dickerson’s sound as an artist, which makes “16 Me” one of the more fitting songs on the collection. The track finds the country crooner reflecting on his youth and seeing how far he has come in his professional and personal life.
Looking back at his teenage self, Dickerson recalls: “Emo haircut, just learning Good Charlotte songs and stuff… It is such a cool moment when you can sit in a writing room and just close your eyes and start rolling out these old memories from 16. Really, I was literally upstairs in my room with a cheap guitar that had electrical tape on. I made it look so dumb. It sounded terrible. And there was a guitar chord sheet that was like, okay, you put this finger here, and I’m trying to learn Chris Tomlin songs, also Incubus songs, also Red Hot Chili Peppers, you know what I mean? So it was such a melting pot of so many different genres, and it was fun to close my eyes and go back to 16 and just start singing all these memories on the paper.”
For Dickerson, the evolution and exponential growth of him from 16 to now, show up not only personally, but in his accomplishments. Already a multi-platinum headliner, he has earned a stretch of five No. 1 tracks with “Yours,” “Blue Tacoma,” “Every Little Thing,” “Love You Like I Used To,” and “God Gave Me a Girl.” The success doesn’t stop there, as Dickerson has grown a massive fan base, earned over a billion streams, and built a solid reputation.
Surprisingly, before his fourth album, Famous Back Home, came to fruition, Dickerson said he had experienced a bit of a mental setback.
“Really last year was a struggle. I’m not going to lie,” Dickerson shared. “ I’m just like, man, I’ve been going after this for a long time. I never try to compare myself to others and their success because everybody has their own way. But just to see people, I feel like I’m just walking on this treadmill, and people are just flying out of nowhere. And here I am, I’ve been at this for, I don’t know, however many years I’ve lost count at this point… but no matter what, I just know what I’m called to do and what me and my wife are called to do is to show the world God’s love through our marriage and show joy through these songs and everything that he is given.”
Fast forward to now, though, these days, what it boils down to for Dickerson is having the freedom of being able to be present with his kids while also doing what he loves the most — music.
“I flew home the other day to spend 14 hours with my kids. So being able to do that is great. But I mean, in a career mode, I think success is enjoyment. Am I enjoying it, or am I striving too hard? Am I focused on the numbers? Am I focused on the charts? Am I focused on this? Or am I in a hands-off and trusting that God has got me right where I’m supposed to be, enjoying this ride? And I really think prior to ‘Happen to Me’ I was struggling with that again. I mean, not harping on it, but I’m like, what am I doing here, bro? But no, it’s just been a fun place to push through those emotions and pray through those emotions and push and push and keep fighting and knowing that something’s going to happen, right? It is just cool to be in a place where I can be like, dude, just chill. Enjoy this. It’s like the craziest ride of my career. Just take it in.”
For more information on Russell Dickerson’s new album, Famous Back Home, and his upcoming tour dates, visit his official website.
