Everything is coming up tulips for Jimmie Allen.
Allen, a New Artist nominee at the 64th Grammy Awards who also presented and performed during the pre-telecast, revealed his third album, “Tulip Drive,” will be available Friday, June 24. He’s set to perform the album’s lead single, “Down Home,” tonight (April 4) on “The Late Late Show with James Corden” on CBS.
“It feels great to be talking about the third album,” Allen says. “A lot of these songs are a lot more personal. A lot of my past songs are about relationships. They weren’t about me. It’s just relationships I saw on TV, relationships I saw my friends having, or stories I read online. This album is lots more about me.”
Allen says he hasn’t heard too many “country love-making songs,” so he included one of “Tulip Drive.” He explains that a couple of the songs are “very traditional country.”
“No matter what kind of country you like, you should at least find one song in there that you love,” he says. “I really got to take my time with this thing.”
Like his past albums, Allen gave his third collection a personal name. While “Mercury Lane” was named for the street on which Allen grew up, “Bettie James” and “Bettie James Gold Edition” were named after his grandmother, Bettie Snead, and father, James “Big Jim” Allen. “Tulip Drive” is the name of the street where his late grandmother grew up.
“A lot of the songs on this album are from that time period,” Allen says in a statement. “I was in high school and college at a place where I was just learning a lot of life lessons from my grandmother. I wanted to honor her by naming this album ‘Tulip Drive,’ after the street she lived on in Lewes, DE.”
Allen recently celebrated his third No. 1 hit, “Freedom Was a Highway,” which is a duet with Brad Paisley.