“Playing for the men and women who have served this country is one of the greatest honors I get as an artist.”
Parker McCollum said that when Amazon Music and Under Armour announced his Veterans Day concert. On Tuesday night, Nov. 10, the Texas singer plays ACL Live at the Moody Theater in Austin for a crowd of active-duty service members, veterans and their families. Anyone can watch it live on Prime Video, Amazon Music and Twitch starting at 8 p.m. Central.
It has been a big week for him. On Nov. 6, he was named one of the 2027 headliners of the Bulls, Bands & Barrels tour.
If you only know him from the radio, Parker is the Conroe, Texas, native behind hits like “Pretty Heart” and “To Be Loved By You.” Ask him who taught him the most about music, and he doesn’t name a famous singer. He names someone who grew up in the same house.
“Nobody’s really taught me as much about songwriting and music as a whole as my older brother,” Parker told ABC Audio.
His brother, Tyler, is six years older. When Parker was still “a literal child,” as he put it, Tyler was already handing him records by Steve Earle, Rodney Crowell and Texas favorite Robert Earl Keen. “He’s the one who showed me who The Band is,” Parker said.
The little brother followed wherever the big brother went. “He could have been ice skating and I would’ve probably fallen in love with ice skating,” Parker joked on “The Kelly Clarkson Show.” “I just wanted to do whatever big brother was doing.”
Tyler did not go easy on him, either. “He was really, really hard on me about the integrity of songwriting at a very young age, and I really identified with that,” Parker told ABC Audio.
So when Parker started writing, he had one listener in mind. “My older brother was always writing songs, and that’s really why I wanted to do it,” he told Cowboys & Indians magazine in 2024. “I was always trying to impress him.”
The song that finally did it came out of an unlikely spot. As a teenager, Parker was sitting in his truck in the parking lot of a Jack in the Box. “So that day in my truck, I wrote a song called ‘Permanent Headphones,'” he said.
Then he played it for the toughest critic he knew. This time his brother didn’t pick it apart. Parker remembered the reaction this way: “Dude. You’re gonna be the next George Strait.”
For a kid from Texas, there is no bigger compliment. George Strait is the man with more No. 1 hits than anybody in country music history.
Years later, those words didn’t sound so wild. On June 15, 2024, Parker’s 32nd birthday, he was one of the opening acts when George Strait played Kyle Field in College Station, Texas. A crowd of 110,905 people showed up. That made it the largest ticketed concert in U.S. history, topping a record that had stood since 1977.
Parker tells Kelly Clarkson about his big brother
In this official clip from “The Kelly Clarkson Show,” he talks about his brother’s influence and those stadium nights with George Strait.
“Permanent Headphones” never really went away. It first came out on a 2013 EP called “A Red Town View,” which later vanished from streaming services. In 2025, Parker put the song on his self-titled album, so the tune from the truck finally got a proper home.
Hear “Permanent Headphones,” the song that won his brother over
Here is the official visualizer, with Parker and an acoustic guitar.
Parker still gives his brother the credit. “So, had he not, for whatever reason, fallen in love with those guys at such a young age,” he told Kelly Clarkson, “I don’t really know what I wanted or what I would’ve ended up doing.”