Dwight Yoakam photo by Cambria Harkey, courtesy of New West Records.

The recording business has gone through fundamental changes several times, driven by the evolution of technology. For decades in its beginning stages, the industry made its money on the sales of singles. The Beatles helped develop an album mentality, and that was heightened by the introduction of the CD in 1983. With the growth this decade of iTunes and digital downloading, the pendulum has swung back toward sales of individual songs.

While many country performers admittedly tried to make albums full of potential singles, Dwight Yoakam has viewed his albums as an artistic statement, which is part of the reason that his most recent release, Dwight Sings Buck, was a tribute to the late Buck Owens.

That was two years ago, and Dwight’s ready to crank out more new material. But he’s been watching the landscape closely, and he’s thinking strongly about tossing aside the album format — at least temporarily — as he figures out what to do with the latest songs he’s written. There’s a strong possibility he may record them one at a time and put them out as individual tracks online instead of making them part of a package.

“There’s something freeing about that,” he told The Houston Chronicle. “It was the way just about everybody did it. But that ended post-Sgt. Pepper’s. My entire career I’ve had to think about a record as 10 to 12 songs, a body of work to be presented to a label. The paradigm has shifted, but nobody’s certain about where it shifted to. We know from what but not to where.”

New music isn’t the only thing on the horizon for Dwight. He worked earlier this year in North Carolina on Provinces Of Night, a film that also features Val Kilmer, Hillary Duff and Kris Kristofferson. The indie title is expected to hit theaters in 2010.

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