New Darius Rucker album out in Oct.

Posted by Jessica Gertler on 07/19/2010
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Fans have been waiting for Darius Rucker’s sophomore album and now, the country pop star has announced the details. The highly anticipated record, Charleston, SC 1966, will hit stores October 12 and include 12 songs.
According to The Boot, Rucker said he wrote 77 songs for the new project, and then weeded out the songs he didn’t feel worthy.
 “We just listened to them and saw what was rising to the top,” Rucker told the Victoria Advocate newspaper in Texas. “When I say that, people say to me, ‘Man, that must be a hard decision.’ ‘No. Not really. The best songs really rise to the top.”
The former Hootie and the Blowfish singer said fans that liked his previous album, Learn to Live, will find a resemblance with his new record.  "I don't think it's going to be light-years different,” he said. “This record is more of an expansion of the last record than anything else. It's like picking up where the last record left off."
At first glance, the new album’s title refers to Rucker’s hometown and the year of his birth. But if you take a deeper look, the title pays tribute to Radney Foster’s first solo album, Del Rio, TX 1959. Rucker said Foster inspired him to pursue a career in country music.
“It was his voice,” Rucker said. “It was really the first time where I had heard country music where I thought, ‘Man, I could sing that.’ I always liked it, but I never really knew I could play it. But then I heard Radney and it was like, ‘Wow, that guy’s amazing.”
Frank Rogers teamed up again with Rucker to produce Charleston, SC 1966 and helped write material for the album.
According to the Associated Press, Rucker said it is normal for him to write a large amount of songs for one album, and he wrote 52 for his previous record.  The award-winning singer said he and a co-writer can turn around six to nine new songs over three days. Rucker said several great songs didn’t make Charleston, SC 1966 simply because they didn’t fit the album’s style. He is offering those songs to other artists- something he didn’t do after he finished Learn to Live.
"I think it was one of those things where I think the last record it would've been hard to have somebody cut a song that we wrote," Rucker said. “It was just so new. It was like, 'Who wants a Darius Rucker castoff?' They might want one now."

Be on the lookout for Rucker on Brad Paisley’s H2O World tour.