If songwriting giant Diane Warren had called Uncle Kracker a year earlier, he might not have recorded "Rescue," the twangy reconciliation song she wrote for him.
"It was weird," Kracker says. "I had never met her and she said, 'This is for you. You have to cut this, because nobody else can.' She played it for me over the phone, and I was like, 'Wow!' But if I hadn't just come out of an almost-divorce I wouldn't have done the song, because it wouldn't have had anything to do with me."
"Rescue" is first single from Kracker's 72 and Sunny, due out June 29th. The "almost-divorce" sparked the laid-back Kracker to write a couple tracks of his own -- "Songs About Me, Songs About You" and "Don't Know How (Not To Love You)" -- that take a dim view at the prospect of breaking up.
"I just wasn't in a good place at all," he says. "I wrote those two dead smack in the middle of that situation, and even after I recorded them I changed them around because I didn't want to make anything worse. Sometimes the truth really does hurt, and I guess I'm not trying to rub anything in. I still gotta see some people."
Kracker's former bandmate Kid Rock does not appear on the record, but the rollicking album opener "Last Night Again" is named for a phrase Kid uses to describe the first beer of the day after a big night. Despite the rowdy concept, the session with country star Kenny Chesney, Poison's Bret Michaels and keyboardist Phil Vassar was anything but.
"It was a Sunday," Kracker says, "and everybody was kind of hungover. It was actually pretty mellow."
