
Country singer Gary Allan continues to back his most recent studio effort, 2005's "Tough All Over," with a fresh slate of concert dates extending into next year.
Allan, a Nashville transplant born and raised in the unlikely country music hotbed of Long Beach, CA, will continue his latest trek Thursday (11/16) in Cleveland. The singer will keep busy through mid-December before taking a breather from his near-constant roadwork, resuming his tour after the new year with a Feb. 2 show in San Antonio.
Allan's sixth studio album on the MCA Nashville label, "Tough All Over," hit stores last October. He recorded the set in the wake of his wife's suicide in 2004.
"Your whole life, all your plans come to a halt," Allan said in his online bio, "and you need to start over again. I was definitely in a place that I had never been, by a long shot, when I made this record."
The album was partially completed when Angela Allan took her life with a self-inflicted gunshot. The couple had been married for three years, and had six children from previous relationships.
"Working on the rest of the album was definitely medicinal for him, you could see that," said Allan's longtime producer Mark Wright, who also manned the boards for "Tough All Over."
"There would be days when he'd come in and say, 'I just couldn't sleep.' But then Gary got to the point where he was actually smiling when he'd come into the studio, because he realized that there was something he'd get out of his system that day. The process evolved from something he was not looking forward to doing, into something that was helping him to heal."
"A Feelin' Like That," the latest single from "Tough All Over," hit radio stations in late October. The single can be previewed at Allan's website.