Kris Allen

On his third full-length album Horizons, singer/songwriter Kris Allen sharpens his songcraft and brings a more boldly openhearted spirit to his soulful brand of poprock than ever before. With his past work including a 2009 self-titled debut featuring the platinum-selling single “Live Like We’re Dying,” Allen’s first independently released album finds him reaching a new level of sophistication in his melody-minded songwriting while fully tapping into his natural grace as a singer and guitarist.

For Allen, Horizons began with the spontaneous writing of “Beautiful & Wild,” one of the album’s most gently powerful tracks. “That song came to me as I was falling asleep, and I got up and started writing and realized it was different from anything I’d ever done,” says the 29-year-old Arkansas native of “Beautiful & Wild,” a song partly inspired by the birth of his first child in the summer of 2013. “It wasn’t trying to be a big pop song or to please anybody else—it just felt very organic and personal and straight from the heart, and that ended up shaping the rest of the record for me.”