Randy Travis To Drop Non-AI Vault Track

Mary Varvaris

Randy Travis is preparing to release a new single after he went “fishing in the vault.”

Randy Travis
Randy Travis(Credit: Marisa Taylor, Courtesy of 117 Entertainment)
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Randy Travis is gearing up to release a song he’s pulled from the vault this Friday (10 July), and, unlike recent releases from the country music icon, it doesn’t appear to contain AI.

In May 2024, Travis released his first new song in over a decade with Where That Came From. The single marked his first studio recording since surviving a near-fatal stroke in 2013, which severely affected his ability to sing and talk.

However, the track generated controversy for being created alongside the use of AI, despite Travis himself giving consent to a then-unnamed vocalist, James Dupré, to help create the single.

At the time, Travis’s longtime producer, Kyle Lehning, explained, “It’s not about how it sounds; it’s about how it feels. Him being here and him being able to be, you know, a vital part of the decision-making process makes all the difference to me.”

Warner Music Nashville Co-President Cris Lacy added, “Randy’s on the other side of the microphone; it’s still his vocal. There’s no reason he shouldn’t be able to make music. And to deprive him of that, if he still wants to do that, that’s unconscionable to me.”

Last year, the pair followed Where That Came From with another AI-assisted track, Horses in Heaven. However, last November, Travis instead opted to search through the vault and released a Christmas song, Where My Heart Is. Now, he’s back and teasing another new song, which he says he found by “fishing in the vault.”

You can see the social media teaser below ahead of the new track dropping this Friday.

The conversation surrounding AI in music is complex and emotional. In 2024, more than 200 artists recently signed an open letter against “efforts directly aimed at replacing the work of human artists with massive quantities of AI.”

Artists like Nick Cave, James Blunt and Jordan Merrick have argued against AI in music, while the likes of Billy Joel, Peter Gabriel, IDLES, and the estate of Elvis Presley utilised it in their campaigns.

However, since then, the issue has only accelerated. Just last week, numerous Australian musicians descended upon Parliament House in Canberra as part of a push for tighter copyright protections for artists amid increasing AI ubiquity and growing concerns about musicians’ work being used to train AI models without explicit consent.