Brandon Pruitt has plenty to be excited about these days. The 23-year-old MTSU graduate has recently signed on with Sony/ATV and is preparing to release his debut album.

Not bad for a guy who didn’t start singing and playing guitar until his late teens.

“It’s really well-rounded,” Pruitt says about his upcoming album, Red Dirt, Blue Country.

The “Red Dirt” in the album’s title refers to a musical genre that comes from the Oklahoma/Texas area that has heavily influenced Pruitt’s sound. Red Dirt bands like Cross Canadian Ragweed draw from blues, southern rock, honky-tonk country and even a bit of jazz and soul to create a boundaries-free sound.

Pruitt’s just finished listening to some of the songs’ final mixes, and is taking some time to reflect on the journey that brought him from small-town Oklahoma to the Sony building on Nashville’s Music Row.

“It’s been a great experience,” Pruitt says about the last couple of months at Sony/Tree Studio in Nashville.

“I love where I’m at, and where I’m definitely gonna go.”

Pruitt arrived in Tennessee in June of 2002, and for the first year-and-a-half the only shows he played were solo acoustic sets.

He remembers playing numerous shows at New York Cafe, back when it was on Greenland Drive, to “absolutely no one,” as he puts it.

Within the last year or so, Pruitt began playing full-band shows at Murfreesboro’s Temptation Club out on Halls Hill Pike, and it was here that he began to build a local fan base. Pruitt feels that hole-in-the-wall places like this are the best places to build a following, because fans can come there and feel more at ease and really let loose in ways they can’t at bigger venues.

On Thursday, May 4, at 8 p.m. The Brandon Pruitt band will be holding their album release party at The Temptation Club. And a couple of weeks after that they will travel to Oklahoma to begin an album release tour.