Storyteller Robert Finley Brings the Images of Louisiana to Life on New Album 'Black Bayou' (Exclusive)

The America's Got Talent alum tells PEOPLE that "if the music is there, then the memory is all that I need to tell the story"

Robert Finley has spent his day thus far surrounded by his grandchildren and great grandchildren, just as he has always dreamed it would be at his age.

“I missed my flight yesterday, so I spent the night in Dallas, so I had my granddaughter come pick me up,” Finley, 69, recounts to PEOPLE in a recent interview. “I just got to spend some quality time with them.”

It’s a sweet piece of an already sweet life for the soulful singer who made the world fall in love with him back in 2019 as he appeared on the fourteenth season of America’s Got Talent, eventually making it to the semi-finals and then, returning to the All Star show earlier this year.

And it’s those fans that have been eager to get their ears on Finley’s fourth studio album Black Bayou, which seems to pulsate directly from the heart and soul of the Louisiana native and includes the undeniable “Waste of Time,” the music video for which is shown above.

“It's hard for me to write the music,” says Finley about the creation of his new album Black Bayou.  “But if the music is there, then the memory is all that I need to tell the story. The story is just a trip down memory lane and 90% of the stories are really true.”

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Because the memories of Louisiana live forever in his mind.

“I remember our farm more than anything,” reflects Finley. “My dad was a sharecropper, so there were times when I wasn’t allowed to go to school because we had to get the crop in at the time, and so there were no exceptions. You had to get it in. You could go to school for a few months, but then we had pull out of school when the corn got ready, or the peas got ready. School was always on the back burner.”

It's an image that Finley can still envision in his mind, despite losing his sight over the past decade because of glaucoma. "We weren’t hungry because we grew our food,” Finley remembers.

“We had our own chickens, and we had a milk cow, and we went to the store to get us flour because I remember us grinding our own meal. So, salt and flour and bacon powder were pretty much all we went to the store for. All our clothes were basically hand-me-downs given to us by what we called then the property owner.”

Life was good, but soon, the family wanted something different.

“One year, as soon as we finished the crop, we decided to stop and my siblings all left home pretty much,” Finley recalls. “Everybody had their dreams of what they wanted to be.”

One wanted to be a butcher, the other a truck driver and one more wanted to be a mechanic. But for Finley, the dreams were bigger.

“I just wanted to be an entertainer,” says Finley, who recently took his entertainer status to the next level with a performance on CBS Saturday Morning. “So now I'm living my dream.”

It’s a dream Finley says he knows not everyone gets to live. Take the story he tells in the song “Nobody Wants to Be Lonely.”

“That one is about me going to the nursing home and visiting friends,” Finley remarks. “And then you see so many people there that don't ever have a visitor. These kids sometime abandon their parents, and they think they're doing what's best for them, but really, they are giving them a life sentence as though they've committed some crime by getting old. But the only way you're going to avoid getting old is to die young, otherwise your day is coming.”

And that’s why Finley believes in the importance of music with a message.

“Music awakens people to things that they never thought about,” he says. “It’s a way of ministering to people without taking them to the church house.”

Finley says he’s glad he’s getting to still provide that sort of testimony at this point of his life. “Everything happens for a reason,” he concludes. “I really believe that if this had happened to me 30 or 40 years ago, I wouldn't have been mentally prepared to handle success. Success will destroy you if you can't stay humble and stay focused.”

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