Gettin’ Comfortable Travis Comes ‘Full Circle’ With New Album

He doesn’t have to say it. You can just tell Randy Travis is relaxed.

It’s in his voice, the way he talks about feeling loose onstage, having more fun than ever. Or in his stories about casually scrapping and re-recording half the tracks on his new album, as he did earlier this year.

But he says it anyway because Travis is a square-shooting guy, and he seems pretty proud - relieved, actually - that life is so easy now.

The small-town North Carolina native has a right to kick back. This spring marked his 10th year as a name-brand country star, and though Travis doesn’t sell 4 million records every time out - as he did with his “Storms of Life” debut in 1986 - he’s content with his solid spot in the country world.

Indeed, Travis, a self-described onetime delinquent who spent plenty of time behind bars, is relaxed.

“I’m almost 11 years into this career. Radio is still very open to playing anything we send ‘em as long as it’s good music, and we can still sell a few tickets and records,” Travis says. “So I’m comfortable. Sure, I feel like I have to compete now with all these folks who’ve only been out there one, two, maybe five years, but I don’t have to compete on their level, if that makes sense to you.”

Yep. Perfect sense. Travis, pegged as a New Traditionalist when he first hit the scene, is now an old New Traditionalist. He may have only a few years up on the pop whippersnappers who clog today’s airwaves, but in a way Travis is a country-music granddaddy.

“Full Circle,” due for release Tuesday, is Travis’ 12th album, and you don’t have to think hard to figure out what the title’s all about.

When Travis crooned his way onto the country scene in 1986, he led the wave of those so-called New Traditionalists, a group that included Ricky Scaggs and George Strait, artists more concerned with country’s Southern roots than the glittery Western neon of the urban cowboy movement.

Travis and the New Traditionalists dominated country through the ‘80s and provided a glimmer of hope that Nashville’s music would remain pure and true while worrying less about pop-chart crossover. Via the rootsy quirkiness of songs like “Diggin’ Up Bones” and “No Place Like Home” - marked by Travis’ rootsy, quirky voice - the young singer set his place in the country pantheon while harking back to personal faves like George Jones and Hank Williams.

Musically, things haven’t changed too much in a decade for Travis, for whom an artistic stretch means recording a song by Dire Straits’ Mark Knopfler. (That tune, “Are We In Trouble Now,” is the first single off “Full Circle,” and it moved into the Top 30 last week.) But in the cyclical world of popular music - in this day of plastic country - Travis’ markedly traditional sound again comes off new.

“We experiment a little bit with every album we’ve done. If you were to line ‘em up and listen to everything - which I’m sure nobody would want to do! - you would hear subtle changes,” he says. “Little instrumentation changes, harmony changes, my voice actually changing. But I still am basically a country singer, and I don’t want to vary too far from that.”