Between his last album If I Were a Butterfly and the newly released True Violet, Nashville’s Rayland Baxter went through what he describes as the most trying time in his life. Still reeling from the death of his father, the legendary musician Bucky Baxter, Rayland was hit with other personal struggles that necessitated major changes including getting clean for the first time in his career as an artist.

Rayland says he was in “shell shock” when writing these new songs and felt like a “mannequin” at times in the studio with producers Paul Butler and Nick Waterhouse. But his sister, his friends and fellow musicians were there with many layers of support from encouragement about the new material to actually picking the album’s title and sequence (the latter thanks to fellow artist and longtime friend Shakey Graves). Dive deeper into the making of True Violet as Rayland Baxter goes On The Record with WNXP.