Raye

Web posted on: Tuesday, August 25, 1998 3:23:26 PM

From Correspondent Bill Tush

NEW YORK (CNN) -- Collin Raye is a country star who's become known for mixing important issues of the day into his music, addressing problems like alcoholism and child abuse. With his new album, Raye also found his personal life showing up in his work in a way that caught him by surprise.

Take his latest hit, "I Can Still Feel You."

A clip from "I Can Still Feel You" Audio clip: 160k MPEG-3 Audio clip: 220k WAV Video clip: 1.2Mb QuickTime File format info Please enable JavaScript

From the minute he first heard the song, Raye loved it. But once he found out who co-wrote the song about the ghost of a broken relationship, he couldn't bring himself to record it. It seems the song was written by Raye's ex-girlfriend and alluded to their own broken love.

"It's almost embarrassing to hear a song that's about you, you know?" he recalls. "And so we waited until like the next session a couple of months later, and then I was more comfortable with it. It wasn't hard to stir up any emotion in it, though."

As an artist, Raye's been stirring up emotion since his debut in 1990. He's churned out 20 top-10 hits since then -- including "On The Verge," "I Think About You," and "Feeling Poor" -- which helped send his first four albums to platinum status.

But along with his successes, Raye quickly found disappointment.

Raye addresses several social issues in his songs, like alcoholism in "Little Rock" (top) and spousal abuse in "I Think About You" (above)

"All of a sudden, it became kind of empty, and I thought, 'Well, there's got to be more to it than that. There's got to be a greater reason for me being here,'" Raye said.

Raye began to find his answer in "Little Rock," a song he did about alcoholism.

"I tagged that video with the 1-800 Al-Anon number, and over 200,000 phone calls came in from alcoholics or family members of alcoholics," he said. "There's many families that were affected by that, and I think that was like a baseball bat in the head to me, like, 'Wow, that's why I'm here.'"

Since then, with each album, Raye's included at least song that addressed an important issue. He's taken on domestic violence, and on his latest album, "The Walls Came Down," the issue is child abuse.

"It has affected so many people. I've started to look at my job as like a ministry, almost," he explains.

Raye may be a country crooner with a cause, but he hasn't lost sight of the fact that he's still an entertainer.

"There's nothing wrong with just having a good time," he concludes. "We always try to make our show the best of both worlds.