MEET MICHAEL RAY, CIRCLING BACK WITH FLORIDA COUNTRY MAGAZINE

EUSTIS PERFORMER ON LIFE AND WHY HOTEL KEYS SOMETIMES DON’T WORK

It is September and the musician and performer Michael Ray is in Fort Myers, Fla. He was in an upper room of the new Luminary Hotel, a slick new highrise along the Caloosahatchee River.

The Luminary guest room is in flat grays, the queen bed left unmade. Only the setting sun lights the room. Michael sipped a vodka and juice cocktail, talked about life before and after Covid. Michael Ray is a talker, mostly because the questions come his way. This is how it works in show business. But he also listens, a full and sincere laugh when you make a funny.

That September night he was headlining the Island Hopper Songwriter Fest, 10 days of music’s star writers and rising performers. These are people in Nashville, writing songs like others build cars or drive trucks. Poets and musicians toiling away at their craft. Island Hopper is their introduction, their coming from behind the curtain. Covid postponed last year’s festival.

Visiting Michael Ray in Fort Myers was a homecoming for Florida Country Magazine, which profiled the young Florida performer in 2018. He is a bright star, in the last decade releasing three No. 1 country songs, including the RIAA Platinumcertified “Think A Little Less, “Kiss You in the Morning,” and “One That Got Away,” while his latest single, “Whiskey and Rain” continues climbing the charts at country radio.

His recent seven-song collection Higher Education features the title track with his friends Lee Brice, Billy Gibbons, Tim Montana and Kid Rock.

After Covid, Michael Ray is bouncing back hard in performance mode. In that layover, he wrote and visited with family.

Ray had also practiced with a vocal coach, exercising the muscles he hadn’t used in fifteen months, he says. “Trying to be very aware,” he says of keeping himself and his voice fit.

Catching Up With Michael Ray

Fort Myers, however, is for catching up with Michael Ray. Florida Country Magazine publisher Scarlett Redenius delivers the questions, Michael, in fifteen minutes of open and fun conversation, gives the answers. The basics are: ‘How you been?’

“It was very easy to lose balance,” he says of Covid, adding that he recorded and wrote in those months. “More of a record I want to make … every artist does that.”

In person, Michael Ray is maybe six-one in boots, bulked up, with gray hair freckled along a ballcap edge, the hat slung on the back of his head. Gray hair is in the genes, he says. But the brawn and life have killed the boyband look that Michael Ray’s handlers had nurtured. And thank goodness, right?

The girls still go nuts. Now women and men buy in.

Secondly: he is still a minstrel. As it was for years and years, a traveling musician lives in one- and two-night stands, grabs their stuff, and goes. Play your ass off. And remember where you’re at, if possible. Say it over and over; ‘I’m in Toledo.’ Know which key opens what hotel door.

That cycle runs months, a hundred performances (to date) in 2021, in Michael’s case, as Covid rules eased.

But that stuff for Michael Ray was old news in Fort Myers. Where had time gone from 2017, when the less seasoned