Gary Allan photo courtesy of UMG Nashville.

Gary Allan’s latest album, Get Off On The Pain, got off to a good start selling 65,000 copies in its first week of release. That’s enough to land him at No. 2 on the Billboard Country Albums chart — trailing only Lady Antebellum’s Need You Now — and at No. 5 on the all-genre Billboard 200.

The title of the album is dark, which is typical for Gary, though the actual music is a little lighter in tone than his previous two releases.

“I was in a good space,” Gary told the Associated Press. “The last two albums came after my wife passed, and a lot of the writing dealt with that. I feel like this is definitely more like a party, foot’s-been-lifted-off-my-head album. It’s fun to play live. It’s definitely a lot more upbeat than our last albums. But it still has a reflection on it.”

Gary’s wife, Angela, committed suicide in their Tennessee home in 2004. His emotional recovery was a long, slow climb. And there’ve been other issues along the way. An angry woman ransacked his house in 2009, claiming he had led her on; he took her to court, testifying on the witness stand that he’d never spoken to her before. His father, Harley Herzberg, died in 2008.

Fortunately, Gary was on good terms with his dad, whose relationship with Gary shifted in a way that’s familiar to a lot of fathers and sons. Gary had a chance to sign a recording deal when he was just 15. Harley declined the contract, believing the boy should wait until a later date. It was almost a decade before Gary recognized that dad knew what he was doing.

“He was right,” Gary conceded. “He used to have this saying that you need to play for the people that love you, the people that hate you and the people that could care less, and then in that you’ll find a way to play for yourself. Which was just a bunch of nonsense I think until I was about 23. And then I became so settled in the band that I’d had for so long, you didn’t think about how you were going to play or how you were going to say something. You just did it the way you do it.”

Gary will spend part of the summer as an opening act on Brooks & Dunn’s Last Rodeo Tour. He’ll appear on GAC Nights Thursday, along with Danny Gokey, at 8 p.m. ET.

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