TIFTON — Kip Moore has been busy.

After releasing his first album, “Up All Night” in 2012, the Tifton native set out on tour after tour, releasing his second album, “Wild Ones” and compiling material for his recently released third album, “Slowheart.”

Somewhere in there, Moore needed a break.

“My soul was in desperate need of a recharge,” said Moore. “All I’ve done is music for the last seven years. Non-stop playing shows, writing records. I just felt like there was no balance in my life, and I completely lost touch of that line of keeping balance and going after what you’re trying to achieve.”

So Moore dropped off the map for a few months, backpacking, surfing and traveling through Iceland.

“It was the single most profound, quiet, closest-to-God feeling I’ve ever had in my whole life,” said Moore. “It was a big game-changer for me.”

So much so that it created a split in “Slowheart.”

“A lot of the songs were born before my travels. There’s a stubborn quality to those songs, a feeling that I’m not quite ready to show my vulnerability and change.

“Then there’s songs like “Try Again” and “More Girls Like You” that were written after my travels. There’s a sense of hope, a sense of doing things different and showing those vulnerabilities the next time around when you’re faced with that same situation.”

Moore gives it a roughly 60/40 split, with 60 percent of the album done before his trip and 40 percent after.

Moore calls “Slowheart” his most anthemic record.

It’s his first turn as a solo producer, after serving as co-producer for his first couple of albums.

He wanted to bring a 70s rock feel, a Motown vibe.

“I had lived with these songs and I knew the exact arrangements that I wanted on them,” said Moore. “I didn’t want to be deterred from what I had in my head, so I just went in and decided to do it myself.”

It’s a different sound for Moore, one that harkens back to growing up in south Georgia.

His dad, Sam Moore, brought him up on what Kip calls “the greatest song writers of all time.”

“Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Jackson Brown, Wilie Nelson, Merle Haggard. Luckily, I had a dad that was really pushing legendary music on me from an early age, which really shaped me.”

His mom, Bonnie, played piano at a Baptist church and taught lessons at home. That was part of it too, he says, all those hymns in the house from an early age.

“That slow pace of living down in south Georgia allowed me to really absorb those songs and live with them,” said Kip.

Moore points to different influences from track to track

On “Just a Girl,” he points to the Rolling Stones and Lynyrd Skynyrd.

“Plead the Fifth,” hints of The Cure and Springsteen.

“Good Things,” Sam Cooke and the Motown era.

“I think naturally listing to those records at an early age and then continuing to study those artists as I’ve gotten older, a lot of that stuff bleeds through the music.”

Of course, with a new album comes a new tour, and Kip’s Plead The Fifth Tour starts up in mid-October.

After that?

“We’ll see what happens,” said Kip. “I’ll never make the same record twice. I’ll never try to hold on to staying young with pop culture and be relevant to that. My music will grow as I grow, and I hope the audience just grows with me.”