Randy Rogers Reflects on the Death of His Father and How the Loss Helped Him Shape the Band's Album
Peter Zavadil Randy Rogers Band
Singer/songwriter Randy Rogers has already had an eventful Wednesday morning. The lead singer of the legendary Randy Rogers Band woke up early, took his two adorable daughters to school, worked out with his trainer, and took a much-needed shower.
And now, he's downright glowing.
"I'm definitely still sweating," Rogers, 44, says with a chuckle during a Zoom interview with PEOPLE. "I think they call that 'the afterburn,' when you're still burning calories after you are done."
He shrugs his shoulders, seemingly accepting the realities of getting older in front of the public's peering eyes. And it's this realization, and many others concerning love and life and loss that one can hear all over Randy Rogers Band's new album Homecoming. Created alongside RRB bandmates Geoffrey Hill, Jon Richardson, Brady Black, Les Lawless, and Todd Stewart, Rogers began work on the groundbreaking project shortly after losing his dad in October of 2020.
"My dad fought cancer for six years before he died of it," says Rogers of his father, who worked as a Southern Baptist minister. "Growing up, he and I had a strange relationship. It was good though. I mean, by the time I was 14 years old, I was playing in a rock and roll band. I had long hair, and we'll just go ahead and say that I probably was breaking a lot of the rules that were set for me."
Peter Zavadil Randy Rogers Band
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Luckily, the father/son relationship eventually evolved, with Rogers quick to note that he and his dad spent many years bonding over the likes of Glen Campbell and the Dallas Cowboys. And it was this latter love that inspired the endearing album cut "Heart for Just One Team."
"I wanted to do something sweet for my dad," Rogers says of the heartfelt song he wrote alongside John Baumann. "It's going to be a hard one to sing." He pauses. "It was one of those songs that we wrote in, I'd say, an hour. It's all true. You don't have to be that creative when you're just telling the story."
And yes, it's a story that still weighs heavily on Rogers' heart.
"My wife always says that I play safe with our music," Rogers jokes about wife Chelsea, to whom he has been married since 2013. "I shoot down the middle and I don't take a whole lot of chances. But I think it's good to do so sometimes and I certainly did it with this one. You get to peel back a couple of the layers of the onion to see that I'm human."
And with Homecoming, it's this human touch that makes the album one of the most enduring of RRB's eight studio albums, which have gone on to chart seven singles on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart through the years.
"We spent a lot of time this time around rehashing those fun stories about making those records long ago," says Rogers, who co-wrote 10 out of the 11 Homecoming cuts alongside writers such as Jack Ingram, Parker McCollum, Randy Montana and Jon Randall. "As a group, we've been together for more than 20 years, and back in the day, we were really clueless as to what we were doing, but at the same time, we were all full of hope and anxiousness and wonder."
Peter Zavadil Randy Rogers Band
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Homecoming also had Rogers reuniting with original producer Radney Foster to come up with the sound of album standouts such as "Picture Frames," "Nothing but Love Songs" and the irresistible "Leaving Side of Town."
"I love country music and cheating songs have long been a staple of our genre," says Rogers. "I don't think every album should have a cheating song, but I think every artist should definitely have one, or at least a few."
Rogers laughs again, seemingly demonstrating again the sweet spot he finds himself in, where love and loss live together as part of the mysterious tapestry that is his world at the moment, including being the busy father of two kids under the age of 10.
"I think as parents, you learn to listen to your kids and their interests and give them every opportunity to do everything, but at the same time, you have to let them pick what they really love," he smiles.
