'Lipstick Promises' Hitmaker George Ducas Is Back with Some New Country Stardust on 'Hello Fool' (Exclusive)

Now 57, the country star will release his upcoming album 'Long Way from Home' in June

George Ducas still remembers the exact time Pete Anderson called him.

"It was a Friday at five," Ducas tells PEOPLE in a recent interview, referring to the career-altering conversation he had back in 2020 with his "favorite guitar player of all time." "We proceeded to have the most fantastic phone call. I wanted to tap into everything that he could bring to the table."

It was at the conclusion of that phone call between the talented singer/songwriter and the Grammy-nominated producer/guitarist that the decision was made to collaborate on an album.

"I'd go down into my man cave and get on a Zoom call with him," Ducas, now 57, remembers of the recording process that took place partially during the darkest days of the pandemic. "He had a guitar in one hand in Los Angeles, and I had a guitar in the other hand in Nashville, and we just really whittled down on these tunes."

These tunes will finally see the light of day on Ducas’ upcoming album Long Way from Home, set for release on June 21. And while the professional collaboration between these two is certainly a special one, so is the personal relationship between the two.

"He has kind of became a father figure to me at a time when my father has stage four lung cancer," says Ducas. "Pete has really entered my life at an amazing time. We talk every week. He's just an incredible friend, but he feels like a father or an uncle or somewhere in between that."

Ducas draws in a deep breath.

"Sometimes, you think about if people had come into your life earlier than they had, things might've been different," he says quietly.

Ducas seems to prefer not to expand on the thought and goes on to joke that he would prefer not to talk about the fact that it has been 30 years since the release of his Billboard Top 10 song and No. 1 CMT video "Lipstick Promises."

"It would've been great if I'd have met Pete when I was in my 20s when I was making my first record," continues Ducas, who has spent many of his years writing hit songs for artists such as George Jones, Garth Brooks and Eli Young Band. "But Pete was really busy at that time too, so there's a reason why things ended up like this."

Indeed, it is in this moment that Ducas finds himself releasing his new single "Hello Fool," an up-tempo barnburner that hides within it some downright sad lyrics. "I think there's a lot of blues to whatever musicality I offer, which is limited," the Texas native explains of the roots of the song premiering exclusively on PEOPLE. "I'm not a guitar virtuoso, but I can usually hack around decently enough to write a good song on."

Another song with the necessary chops to become a future single is "Do What the Lonely Do," an addictive lyrical gem that Ducas wrote alongside Jacob Lyda and Pete Anderson.

"It turned out differently than I heard it in my head, but I really like what Pete added," says Ducas. "He just really dug his teeth into this album. I think Pete hadn't made a record like this in a while — by his own admission — and he almost had to get back into the zone and sort of prove that he could do it again… or still do it."

Anderson did it his way … and Ducas let him.

"He won't let it rest and that’s completely not the way Nashville makes records," concludes Ducas. "There's no clock. It's not, 'Let's see how many songs we can get done in a three-hour time period.' I mean, he will just sit there and let it ruminate and he'll come back on a different day and do it again and play something else he likes better. I just loved that. I loved him. I loved the entire process."

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