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\n\tWhen Marcus King<\/a> dropped Darling Blue<\/em> last September, he viewed the album as a personal retrospective. It was a record about growth, sobriety, and keeping demons at bay. King told Rolling Stone about choosing an even-keeled lifestyle<\/a>, and the South Carolina native had a handful of tunes that reflected the impact of that decision.<\/p>\n \n\tAt first, those songs landed on the cutting room floor, but King couldn\u2019t let them go. Now, he\u2019s released them on No Room for Blue<\/em>, a companion album that drops on Friday.<\/p>\n \n\tKing and his band began recording Darling Blue<\/em> in Macon, Georgia, at the venerable Capricorn Studios \u2014 often cited as the birthplace of Southern rock \u2014\u00a0before finishing the project at Blackbird Studios in Nashville. Working with producer Eddie Spear (Zach Bryan, Brandi Carlile), King ended up with enough tracks to span two albums. He views them as complementary sides to the same story.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cWe\u2019ve got alternate versions of songs,\u201d King tells N<\/em>, \u201cones that didn\u2019t quite make the cut, or that I thought should have made the cut but that got cut because we had so many to choose from. The name was our cute little way of saying that. The initial release was most of the Nashville stuff. This one makes me feel more like it\u2019s Macon. All the shit on here, we recorded in Macon.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tBlue Drew Smithers, who plays guitar for King, says the studio time in Macon gave No Room for Blue<\/em> a heavier slant toward Southern rock than Darling Blue<\/em>.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cYou were just trying to soak up as much as you can that would have played between the walls,\u201d Smithers says. \u201cCapricorn Studios was home of early Allman Brothers, Marshall Tucker, all that stuff. That label was a thriving label in the South in the Seventies, and I think a lot of the music that we listen to came out of there. We tried to take what they did and spin it our way.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tThe LP will land on streaming services as Darling Blue\/No Room for Blue<\/em>, but savvy fans of King will note that it dropped in a physical format last November \u2014 as a Record Store Day vinyl release. The 12 tracks (including three of those alternate versions of Darling Blue<\/em> songs) are all written or co-written by King.<\/p>\n