Daughtry: Town Where You Belong

For "Leave This Town," the album's creation was much more collaborative and inclusive. Case in point: The cover of the first album showed Daughtry alone, front and center, with blurred, anonymous bandmates in the background. On the cover of "Leave This Town," the faces of all of the band's members are clearly seen.

While Daughtry remains the band's primary songwriter, he worked with Steely and Craddock on several tracks, as well as longtime friends of the band like Nickelback's Chad Kroeger and Brian Howes, who co-wrote "Over You" for Daughtry's first album.

The first single, "No Surprise," was first played live on "American Idol" and now stands at No. 51 on the Billboard Hot 100, with 268,000 digital copies sold, according to Nielsen SoundScan. Touring with Nickelback bolstered Daughtry's reputation—besides exposing the band to the established act's audience, it also melded the relationship between Daughtry and Kroeger as songwriters. "They just get along famously," McIlwaine says. "Forget about the music side of it—they really just get along as people." On "Town," Kroeger and Daughtry wrote numerous tracks, including "No Surprise."


"You're looking for something that's obviously going to be radio-friendly," McIlwaine says of the first single. "The second requirement is, 'Will it be a great launching point for the campaign? Will it tell people he's back? Does it have the signature Daughtry sound?' That's the song that raised its hand."

Right now the leading contender for the second single is the ballad "Life After You," a plaintive take on loss that's reminiscent of "Home" from "Daughtry." McIlwaine is giving "No Surprise" plenty of time to develop; "Life After You" will start being worked to radio in the fall.

And while Daughtry's voice and rock riffs still play center stage to most of the album's tracks, several songs take some creative chances. Daughtry wrote "You Don't Belong" on his own; it's a hard-driving song that wouldn't sound out of place on an Alice in Chains album. And "Tennessee Line," featuring a fiddle and vocals from Vince Gill, fits comfortably in the country-rock crossover space, a la Lady Antebellum.

"Leave This Town" came together in a couple of months, without any deadline pressure from the label, McIlwaine says. "We didn't do that knee-jerk thing when you have a hot record," he says. "The first album was a great run for us, and the record company usually wants you to churn another one out by Christmas, right? And we just didn't do that. We said, 'This is a really important album—the first album we didn't have the band hired yet.' Chris has always been in bands, and it's really important to Chris to go out and be a band."