John PayCheck details new album "Better Plan"

John Paycheck, who performs as John PayCheck, is keeping his father Johnny Paycheck's legacy going, not by imitating his sound but by carving out his own lane in traditional country. He launched his own music career in 2021 after 20 years in the military, where he worked as his father's tour manager before enlisting in the Army after September 11, eventually becoming a helicopter and fixed wing pilot and rising to the rank of Major, making him one of the highest-ranking officers in country music.

His new album, Better Plan, is out November 27 through HorseBite Entertainment, produced by Bill McDermott at Gnome Studios in Nashville. PayCheck wrote 10 of the album's 14 tracks himself, with frequent collaborator Scott Gabbey contributing to several others, including the sole song Gabbey wrote alone, "Stop and Say Hello." The title track, a fiddle-driven song out now, gives the record its name.

"This is a song about the quiet struggle to become a better person in a world that is quick to judge and slow to understand," PayCheck said of "Better Plan." He described it as following a man who has made mistakes and carried pain but refuses to stop trying, adding that the song is "about choosing humility, hope, forgiveness and the determination to keep searching for a better you with a better plan."

The rest of the tracklist runs "Clover," "Sons Of The Spark" (featuring Struggle Jennings, son of Waylon Jennings' son Shooter), "Point Them North," "Uber To The Opry," "Battles You Never Knew," "Pieces," "Texan One Day," "Stop and Say Hello," "All Up To Time," "Daddy Are You Listening," "JD Foster," "Turn the Page" and "Shine."

PayCheck has said he wants to bring back a more traditional, 90s-inspired country sound: "I would like to give people what they feel they have been missing the past 15 years." Better Plan will put that approach to the test when it arrives this fall, tracked on the release calendar.