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Gary Allan backs 'Tough' with lengthy tour
Country singer Gary Allan , fresh off a pair of Academy of County Music Awards nominations, is on the road in support of his 2005 release "Tough All Over."
The Nashville-transplanted native Californian is booked for a number of dates in March and April, with more confirmed shows following throughout the remainder of the year, mostly consisting of state and county fair appearances.
Allan's sixth studio album on the MCA Nashville label, "Tough All Over," hit stores last October. The set was recorded in the wake of Allan's 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."
"Tough All Over" earned Allan an Academy of Country music nomination for Album of the Year, and the song "Best I Ever Had" off that disc is nominated for Single of the Year.
