Patrick Droney Is in Pursuit of the Present

The singer maps out his excellent new album, Made You Look, which features the standout Kelsea Ballerini duet, "Math of Us"

Somewhere between Nashville and New York, Patrick Droney picked up photography. The East Coast native was looking for answers at the tail-end of recording 2023’s hailed Subtitles for Feelings, what he deems a “rabbit hole” of an album. 

“I thought I was in an answer moment with that record, but you know it was just a strange way to land a plane and know that I needed to get back on the ground to get altitude again,” he tells Rolling Stone.

So, he bought a hulking cinema camera and stepped outside his Brooklyn apartment. Amid the city’s determined busyness, Droney gravitated toward its more pastoral scenes — a woman flipping through an inky newspaper on a bench, subway passengers dreamy in thought during their daily commutes, a radiating open sign hung in the window of a Chinese restaurant.

Not the first to do it, and especially not in New York, he likens the experience to “reading letters from dead poets.” And as he once again found himself in the pursuit of meaning, Droney says, “that camera kind of got me through” to his new album, Made You Look. 

Speaking to Rolling Stone over Zoom, Droney considers his first full-length LP in three years, during which he became a father, as fully cemented in the present. “There was no posturing of figuring out the past or being in a future that I don’t know yet,” he says. “Right now, I just want to document this beautiful moment in my life, and I’m grateful for that chance to do that.”

Cities have often been the co-star in Droney’s music. His searing self-titled EP contained the aptly named “Brooklyn,” the kind of song that ricochets with nostalgia. State of the Heart, the mid-pandemic album he dropped in 2021, delivered tracks like “Where You Are” and the gut-punch “Glitter” that ambled down lonely streets and took inventory of a decade of grief, vulnerability, and the relentless nature of time. 

With this year’s Made You Look, time and the cities it passes through still get top billing, but Droney resolutely looks at the now. “What got me altitude for the new record is just real life. It wasn’t music. It was just life happening to me,” he says. “That was the best way to come back and make a record like Made You Look, because it was just truly about the present.”

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The approach feels like an act of rebellion on a floating rock where technology (and our shrinking attention spans) has catapulted us into what Droney calls “uncharted territory of time and space.” A minute is now 45 seconds, he says, adding “the atomic clock has shifted.”

If staying wholly present is a push against the chirping comments, likes, and views harvesting our attention, it’s also a code that informs every step of Droney’s latest LP from his slick melodic lyrics to production. The album captures moments like still frames, from the Stephen Wilson Jr.-assisted “Cigarette Break” that envisions a “break down on a southbound interstate” to the gentle title track that admits “memories change and Polaroids fade.”

“[Made You Look] was made in attics of old houses, garden apartments and real studios,” says Droney, who embraces the more amiable parts of tech with old school methods. There were Zoom sessions and musicians cutting strings in Italy before crushing them into a file and zipping them across an ocean. “That’s a really great thing, in my opinion, to spend time with people who you actually aren’t in the room with and have that collaboration. There’s been a real sense of like utilizing what’s in front of me.”

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The LP’s standout single, “Math of Us,” is a testament to Droney’s conviction to making the present count. Prior to the album’s release, Droney and country star Kelsea Ballerini became acquainted during her temporary residence in New York City. As an introduction to the city, Droney sent his then-unreleased third album, what he dubs his “New York album.”

Ballerini returned the favor by texting him the “nicest voice notes, song by song,” a bona fide blue moon in the industry, and asked if she could be a part of “Math of Us.” She had played it on repeat during her walk on the West Side Highway. 

Despite the track already having been cut and done, Droney and Ballerini later met in Manhattan and cut her vocals right on her apartment floor. “She’s become such a good friend.The song is more real for her being on it because it’s a conversation now. It’s not an inner dialog. It’s between just people. I think that’s really special,” says Droney. 

After Ballerini joined the picture, Droney knew that the song needed a video. The video, Droney’s directorial debut, was shot in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park and underlines the song’s timely call to hold onto life’s tangible matters with a cast of friends, family, and local couples captured in different phases of their life. In particular, one couple, Nelson and Vicky, both 80, who Droney assumed had been together for decades, had just met last year. 

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Droney, who made his Opry Debut earlier this month and is in the middle of his fall tour in support of the new album, has also been thinking about “unfinished business.” He muses, “How do you create something and call it done when we leave this earth for unfinished business? Towards the end of this project, I realized the beauty of this is that I don’t think it’s done.”

So, does that make Made You Look his question era? “There will always be another question, and that is part of an acceptance that this album’s era has really helped me embrace,” he says. “That when you get there, there is not there. Therefore, be here.”