Rory Feek is releasing his new album, Gentle Man, on June 18, and he shared another song from the project on Friday when he released a collaboration with Trisha Yearwood, “Met Him in a Motel Room.” Yearwood previously included the song, which Feek co-wrote, on her 2014 album PrizeFighter, and Feek wrote on his blog that her singing with him on his album is “extra-special.”
“Trisha Yearwood sang with me on this one,” he wrote. “Which is special for me for a couple of reasons. First off, she recorded it herself on her album PrizeFighter a few years ago. So she already blessed me once by doing that. And now, she’s singing with me on my recording of the song, which is extra-special for a songwriter to have happen.” Feek wrote “Met Him in a Motel Room” with Jamie Teachenor, and the song is “about a woman of the night… sort of.”
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The 55-year-old explained that “Met Him in a Motel Room” is “actually about the emptiness inside us that we try and try to fill, with money and things, with work or with alcohol. With drugs and sex and whatever else we can, only to find that that empty spot inside of us, that all that stuff is supposed to fill… doesn’t. And often, we find ourselves in a free fall, at the end, of the end, of our rope.”
“I know that feeling well,” he continued. “Do you? Have you tried and tried to find joy and happiness in ‘stuff’? Or in someone? And it’s left you empty. Still. We all have to find our ‘bottom.’ The point where we’ve done all that we can personally do to get our lives and our hearts on track and realize that we’re still making a mess of it. A moment of complete surrender. When we finally give God the reigns and let him start guiding our steps and Him be the light we walk towards.”
Gentle Man is Feek’s first solo album and the first album he has recorded without his late wife, Joey Feek. “I’ve been in the studio making a new album for the last few months,” he wrote in a blog post in January. “And that’s a big, big change for me. To make a record without Joey isn’t something that I was sure I’d ever do. The fact is, I’ve never made my own record. I’ve only been part of the albums that she and I made through the years.” Feek noted that it has been five years since he and Joey recorded their Grammy-winning album Hymns That Are Important to Us, and “I guess it was finally just time.”
“So, this past fall, I went into the studio with producers Ben Isaacs and Matt Johnson and some of Nashville’s greatest musicians and recorded 14 new songs,” he continued. “Fourteen stories that are about to become part of mine. And to say that I’m excited about it is an understatement.”
