(Radio.com) Frankie Ballard, like many other country singers on the rise, is hoping to take his career to the next level with his latest album. But to get it right on his new album, the recently released El Rio, he felt he had to leave Music City.

"I have done a lot of recording in Nashville, and I get distracted very easily in Nashville," he explains to Radio.com. "People stop by the studio: 'Hey, man, how's things going in here?' and 'Can we bring you anything?' I live there as well.

"I knew that we needed to take this next album to a new level, and the only way to do that was to get focused and not have any of those distractions. So I found this place called the Sonic Ranch down in El Paso. I treated it like a mission: 'We gotta go down to the border; we gotta bring back the treasure!'"

He notes that the studio had a lot of vintage equipment, which was very appealing to him. "I'm 33, I grew up in the '80s and '90s, but I kind of feel like I grew up in the '50s because of the music that my dad played for me. He played me his favorite albums: Elvis, Johnny Horton and Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings and Kenny Rogers. I fell in love with the album experience."

And while it often feels like we're living in a singles world, Ballard still loves the art of the album. "I think human beings like to watch three minute YouTube videos, they like to watch fifteen minute cartoons, they like to watch thirty minute TV shows, they like to watch two hour movies. People like to consume music differently too. People like to [listen to] a couple of hot singles on the way to work to get jacked up. But sometimes it's nice to put an album on, something that has a feeling, that brings back memories, that takes you someplace. I'm one of those people. So I don't think the album will ever be dead, until artists stop making albums." Read more here.