When the music business got Scotty McCreery down, he used a baseball tactic to bounce back

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Scotty McCreery celebrated his second consecutive number one, “This Is It,” at a party Wednesday afternoon at ASCAP in Nashville.

The American Idol winner admits it’s particularly sweet, because it wasn’t that long ago he faced an uncertain future, after parting ways with his first record label.

“One of the things I’ve learned through my whole life is that things are never on a straight line,” the North Carolina native reflects. “It’s never always gonna be up, it’s never always gonna be down. You’ve just gotta keep rolling.  And I can think back to plenty of times in my life where I got knocked down and had to get back up again. 2016 was that year for me, musically…”

Scotty goes on: “I could go [back] to middle school in my seventh grade year, getting cut from my baseball team,” he continues, “And I was just like, ‘Are you kidding me?'”

But Scotty faced his challenges in the music industry much like he dealt with his teenage disappointment.

“I worked my tail off for an entire year,” he recalls, “tried out again in eighth grade, and I was the number-one pitcher and our clean-up batter that whole year…”

“So there’s a lot of moments in life where you get knocked down,” Scotty explains, “but you can have one of two reactions: you can just say, ‘Oh, that stinks and I’ll never do that again.’ Or you can pick yourself up, work harder, and go at it again. And that’s kinda what I did back then, and what I did these last couple years.”

Scotty’s third single from his Seasons Change album — and perhaps his third #1 — is the track “In Between.”

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