Charlie Worsham released his third solo album, Once Upon a Second Time Around, on 7 August 2026 via ONErpm, a distributor that works with independent artists and labels to get music onto streaming platforms and digital stores. The record arrives nine years after his last full-length, 2017's The Beginning of Things, and follows the 2023 EP Compadres. Billboard

Worsham co-wrote roughly half of the album's twelve songs. The other half came from outside writers, tracked down with help from Josh Van Valkenburg, Sony Music Publishing's executive vice-president of creative, who sourced several cuts including the title track. Among the outside songs is 'Family Man', written by Josh Jenkins, Ben Stennis and Matt Rogers, and 'They Never Do', written by Lainey Wilson, Dallas Wilson and Josh Nix.

Wilson also sings on the album, renewing a collaborative relationship that began on the Compadres EP, where the two previously recorded together. Her writing credit on 'They Never Do' places one of country music's most prominent current hitmakers on the album's songwriting roster as well as its vocal credits.

Before his solo career, Worsham built a résumé as a sideman. He has been part of the touring bands for Vince Gill and Dierks Bentley, and had a brief stint with Old Crow Medicine Show. His formal training came at Berklee College of Music in Boston, before he relocated to Nashville — the city where publishing executives like Van Valkenburg operate and where much of country's songwriting business is concentrated.

The album's path to release spans years and multiple writers, but its footprint is compact: a dozen songs, split between Worsham's own pen and a curated set of outside cuts, delivered through ONErpm rather than a major label. For listeners who have followed Worsham since 2013's Rubberband, it is the first full-length statement of new material in nearly a decade.

For fans, the album reunites Worsham with a voice — Lainey Wilson's — that already sat alongside his on record, and it widens the circle of Nashville songwriters contributing to his catalogue. The choice of ONErpm as distributor signals an independent release path, keeping the project outside the three major-label system that dominates the Billboard charts.