Country singer Drake White: ‘I had to learn to walk again’

It wasn’t just the pandemic that delayed The Optimystic, the 2022 long-playing follow-up to country singer Drake White’s 2016 album, Spark.

“Oh man, how long do you have?” says the singer, speaking to the Cambridge Independent from his farm north of Nashville, Tennessee.

“It’s a combination of the music industry, the music business, my health – I had a stroke in 2019 that put me in a place where I had to relearn how to walk…

“My wife got an autoimmune disorder and faced a lot of different disabilities, we had to get back on top of that.

“The pandemic happened, after that I lost my record deal, I lost my management deal... I rebuilt my team, learned how to walk again, got my wife to learn how to walk again, had a baby, so yeah, there’s been a couple of things in life that have made that gap that long.”

But Drake, whose stroke was caused by a rare vascular disorder called arteriovenous malformation (AVM), is an optimist, as the title of his latest album might suggest.

“I don’t think you can claim to be an optimistic if you haven’t been through s*** and you just claim to be positive,” he says. “I think that these obstacles that we’ve been through, they’re part of my story, and I always say ‘Aretha Franklin can’t sing like Aretha Franklin if she hadn’t been through anything’.

“The soul has to go through a lot of stuff to sing soul music, and so I’m proud of that fact, that we came through what we came through and I still am glass half full, I still think I’ve just begun and the best days are ahead of me.

“I still think that we will sell out the O2 arena, Madison Square Garden – I don’t think that, I know that. I know these things because I’ve seen it in my dreams – it’s so palpable to me that I can touch it. So The Optimystic because it is about being positive.

“You can’t just be positive when things are good, it’s about being positive through the mystery of things going up and things coming down, so that’s why I put those two words together.”

Drake’s music, which has manifested itself through hits such as It Feels Good (with a memorable video filmed on the bayou in Slidell, Louisiana) and Livin’ the Dream, could be classified as ‘country soul’.

“Yeah, that’s a good way to describe it,” he says. “I grew up outside of Muscle Shoals in Alabama, very soulful place, very quiet, country-type living.

“It’s just a soul-driven place; there’s a lot of spritual-type stuff in the water out there that dates back all the way to the Civil War and really slavery times and that kind of stuff. It just exudes soul music and country, in the Appalachian Mountains there in North Alabama.”

On what he’s been up to of late, music-wise, Drake says: “Oh man, well, we’ve been touring and just playing a lot of shows through the spring. We’ve been touring with The Optimystic and working on a couple of other projects as well; I’ve been working with my buddy Jonathan Singleton on a project we’re really excited about.

“But as of right now, just getting ready to come over there and see you guys, and writing music and getting records out, getting songs out.”

Drake has been coming to the UK for about six or seven years – he was on the bill alongside Texas legend Lyle Lovett and Grammy Award-winning singer-songwriter Chris Stapleton at the C2C festival at the O2 in 2019 – but, whereas some of his contemporaries have spoken of the differences between British and American audiences, the 39-year-old doesn’t see it that way.

“It’s just new people,” he says, “it’s a big world, the internet and everybody tries to make you think differently and tries to make it smaller – and it has made it smaller – but there’s a lot of people in this world and music can touch a lot of people in a lot of different ways.

“People try to say it’s a lot different than America, I don’t have that experience – people are people and I don’t care if you’re from Alabama or if you’re from Cambridge or London, it doesn’t matter. There is a different humour, there’s a different reverence.

“Y’all don’t get the American country music as much, so I think there’s a little bit more of a reverence to it and an appreciation for it when we’re there. But the American crowd is just loud and rowdy and so are you guys.”

Drake, who notes that he’s always writing songs, has a new single titled The Bridge coming out this month. This will be followed by the project he’s been working on with Jonathan Singleton, who has previously written for the likes of Luke Combs, Josh Turner, Lainey Wilson, and Tim McGraw.

A keen advocate of mental health awareness (“I feel like I owe it to society to go in and usher them through hard times”), Drake will be appearing at Cambridge Junction (J1) on Sunday (June 25).

Tickets, priced £23.50, are available at junction.co.uk. For more on the artist, go to drakewhite.com.