He knew that hook was worth working on, so he saved it for another day. That day came on April 26, 2022, when songwriters Natalie Hemby (“Heartache Medication,” “Pontoon”) and Jeremy Spillman (“Hell on the Heart,” “Arlington”) came to his house to work on songs. He played the verse and chorus of “What Kinda Man,” and it was already so far along that his co-writers felt strongly they should try to finish it.

“Parker just gave it to us, like our Christmas presents,” says Hemby. “I’m so grateful to him. We may have changed a few lines, but that was it for the first verse and the chorus. He came with a fully fleshed-out idea.”

Like McCollum, they recognized that the chorus – “Forget the man I am/ What kind of man do you need?” – was powerful. “I just don’t know what girl in the whole world doesn’t want to hear that,” Hemby says with a serious expression, “because we love changing people.”

McCollum had a specific request for the second verse. He wanted to include a particular line: “I swore I’d never set foot in Union Valley Church again,” which he wrote as a reference to a place in Oklahoma he’d discovered by chance on his drive home from turkey hunting.

“We actually stopped right there to smoke a joint, which is a bit blasphemous,” he admits. “But I took the photo with my phone.”

The church became a symbol of the singer’s determination to change his life; he was willing to return to a place he despised and try to find redemption in order to win a woman. “I think that’s a theme that applies to a lot of men,” Spillman says. “You can listen to that song and identify with that character. We’re kind of agitators until we find the one who gives us a reason not to be that way.”

They recorded a guitar/vocal tape with a slight swing feel, with Hemby creating a template for a harmony part. McCollum considered recording it for his 2023 album, Never enoughbut he never really got around to it. After recording about seven tracks for his next album, he switched producers to change his sound. He called Frank Liddell (Miranda Lambert, David Nail) and Eric Masse (Charlie Worsham, Waylon Payne) and recorded a few songs at Blackbird Studio in Nashville in mid-summer with a hand-picked five-piece studio band: drummer Nir Z, bassist Eli Beard, and three guitarists – Adam Wright, Harrison Whitford, and Nick Bockrath of Cage the Elephant.

The night before the session, McCollum decided the phrasing in the second half of the second verse could be tighter, so he rewrote that section of “What Kinda Man.”

At the session, Liddell had the band record an instrumental piece first to develop some cohesion. Sitting in the control room before tackling “What Kinda Man,” McCollum decided they should record it as a shuffle, but otherwise they mostly had the band play the song on repeat, finding their groove. They played without a click track, which gave the performance a looser feel, and the final single was based on one specific run-through. McCollum sang at the top of his lungs on each take.

“He brought it almost like an athlete,” Liddell says. “That’s really important, because especially when you’re doing something like that live, (the voice) is the most important instrument in the room, and if you can’t hear it, or if the person can’t sing, or if they’re just sending it in, then it affects everything else.”

Liddell felt McCollum’s vocals were strong enough in the studio for the final performance, but McCollum insisted he was a little worn out from the tour and could improve. So he later held an overdub session where he completed his vocal work and also brought in the harmonica piece. Wright sang a harmony part, and they called in Madi Diaz, who had worked with Liddell on Lambert’s “Vice,” to provide a moody countermelody in the background.

“We felt like there should be a woman in it and we just tried to find something interesting,” says Liddell. “That kind of solves the whole problem of having a woman in it. The song is about talking to a woman.”

The resulting track is both boastful and apologetic. “When we heard it, it sounded like a jam,” says Spillman.

MCA Nashville surprised McCollum by selecting “What Kinda Man” as his next single, thinking the production might be too raw for country radio. But the storyline fits his own transformation from agitator to married man, and the song overall lives up to his standards.

“When I write songs,” says McCollum, “all I think about is: Would Rodney Crowell like this? Would Steve Earle like this? Would James McMurtry or Robert Earl Keen think this is good for country music? And I think they would think the song is good for country music.”