[People] Aaron Watson Will Donate $1.41 from Each Sale of His New Album to the Rebuild Texas Fund

Although Aaron Watson has been singing country music for nearly 18 years, he feels like he’s just getting started.

“Kris Kristofferson said, ‘Write a thousand songs, then throw them away. Now you’re ready to be a writer,'” Watson tells PEOPLE, recalling a quote from one of his songwriting icons. “I really feel like I’m just getting to that point in my career where I am really starting to hone in on my craft.”

Watson just released his 14th studio album titled Aaron Watson Live at the World’s Biggest Rodeo Show, which marks his first live album in nearly a decade. He recorded it while playing the Houston Rodeo in his hometown, and for him, performing there in front of 65,000 fans was “the greatest honor.”

“It’s like a golfer getting that green jacket from winning the Masters,” the “Outta Style” singer says. “It’s just such a big deal.”

However, Watson recorded the album prior to Hurricane Harvey in 2017, which devastated Houston and surrounding Texas cities, and there never felt like an appropriate time to release the record.

“Obviously when you’ve got millions of people going through such heartache and hardship that was dealt by Hurricane Harvey, our album just became very insignificant,” he says. “I honestly just thought that this was going to be an album that was never going to materialize.”

As time moved on and he got further and further away from the time he recorded the album, it began to feel like “yesterday’s news” to him and his crew. However, as more and more natural disasters hit the U.S. coasts and other stories had bigger impacts, he recognized that Hurricane Harvey was also being pushed out of the news cycle, despite the community still dealing with the crippling amounts of damage.

That’s when he decided to turn the album into a tribute album, and to donate $1.41 from each record sold to the Rebuild Texas Fund.

“Twelve months ago, it was the front page of every paper,” Watson says. “It was the headline on every channel. It was trending on socials, and 12 months later, nobody talks about it. The fact of the situation is that in 12 months, you can’t overcome $125 million in damage impacting 13 million people in 41 Texas counties. I mean, I’m pretty sure that 13 million people in 41 Texas counties is larger than a lot of states, and that’s just the south Texas coast.”

“Texas is home,” he adds. “The Texas music scene is my bread and butter and what’s taken care of me and my family for all these years.”

Read the full story at People