Richard Surratt Jr. Doesn't Write From a Perfect Place — And That's the Whole Point

The Songs Come From the Stuff He Buried

Some artists write to look good. Richard Surratt Jr. writes because there's always something that needs to be said — and most of it isn't pretty.

He grew up on the storytellers. Hank Williams. Johnny Cash. The kind of music where you learned something about the person singing it. Later it was Cody Jinks, Sturgill Simpson, Jelly Roll — artists who never bothered dressing up the rough parts. That's the lineage Richard writes from. Not the polished version. The honest one.

"A song didn't have to be perfect to be powerful," he says. "It just had to be honest."

He started writing to get thoughts out of his head and onto paper. Then it turned into something bigger. The losses, the mistakes, the anger, the hope — he figured out he could take all of it and turn it into stories other people might recognize themselves in.

That's the whole engine. His music, in his words, is his life translated into sound.

No Genre. He Follows the Story.

Here's what makes Richard hard to file away: he refuses to. Sometimes it's country. Sometimes rock. Sometimes there's hip-hop or something darker crawling in the corners.

"If a story needs an acoustic guitar, that's what it gets. If it needs a hard beat, distorted guitars, or something darker, I follow the story."

That's not indecision. That's a songwriter serving the truth of a moment instead of chasing a lane. The genre changes. The honesty doesn't. That's the through-line, and once you hear it, the shifting sounds start making sense.

His songs moves through the whole range — survival, darkness, loss, dreams, anger, and flat-out refusing to stay down. Some tracks lean Americana. Some go heavier. It's all the same person telling the same story from different sides.

What It Actually Cost

Richard doesn't pretend this was easy to make. Writing meant sitting with memories he wasn't ready to revisit. It meant feeling things he'd spent years trying to bury. And it meant putting pieces of himself on paper that people might judge, misunderstand, or use against him.

But the biggest cost was heavier than any of that.

"The biggest cost was realizing that some of the worst things I've lived through couldn't be changed. I could only decide what I did with them."

So he turned them into songs. That's the move a lot of people talk about and few actually pull off.

There were times he questioned whether any of it mattered, whether anyone would ever hear it. Times it would've been easier to shelve the whole thing. He kept coming back. Not because life got figured out — because music gave him somewhere to put what he couldn't carry around forever.

He also had to let go of one lie a lot of independent artists get stuck on: that you need permission to call yourself an artist. No label. No perfect genre fit. No sounding like everybody else. You just have to keep writing.

"The biggest victory isn't that I've overcome everything. It's that I'm still here, still creating, and still telling my story."

For the Ones Carrying Their Own Weight

Richard isn't selling a clean version of himself. He wants that clear up front.

He's a real person who's been through real stuff, and the music comes straight from it. Some songs hurt. Some are angry. Some are about survival, mistakes, or just making it through another day. He doesn't expect everyone to relate to every track.

But if one song hits somebody at the right moment and makes them feel understood — that's the job done.

To him, listeners aren't numbers. They're family. And he means it when he says he hopes to be making music for many more years to come.

What's Next

The plan is simple and stubborn: keep making music, keep building. More releases. More experimenting across sounds. Writing songs people can relate to everyday.

The goal is bigger than dropping tracks. He wants to build something that lasts, where people know the name because a song reached them and made them feel something real.

There are plenty more stories left to tell. He's not slowing down.

Follow him on Instagram and YouTube and watch the catalog grow.