With an upcoming album that elevates his songwriting, former “One Tree Hill” star back in Carolinas

Description: Actor/singer-songwriter Tyler Hilton spent a lot of time in North Carolina while filming “One Tree Hill” between 2004 and 2012. His current tour brings the “Walk the Line” star back to the Carolinas Tuesday when he plays Free Range Brewing.

Actor/singer-songwriter Tyler Hilton spent a lot of time in North Carolina while filming “One Tree Hill” between 2004 and 2012. His current tour brings the “Walk the Line” star back to the Carolinas Tuesday when he plays Free Range Brewing.

“North Carolina has this perfect cross-section of everything I love about the South and about indie alternative culture,” says Hilton, while stuck in traffic in Philadelphia last week. “Wilmington has that, but so does Raleigh and Charlotte. It’s the perfect balance of Southern tradition and progressive ideals.”

The current tour is in preparation for the January release of his new album “City on Fire,” which finds him pushing stylistic and lyrical boundaries as a writer. The title track for instance is a murder ballad inspired by troubadours like Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, and Towes Van Zandt.

“I wanted to tell a simple story about love and revenge and taking matters into your own hands in a time period when things are politically crazy and California is on fire,” says Hilton, who wrote the track in 2016. “There’s so much frustration and powerless in it, but it’s become one of my favorite songs I’ve ever written.”

His wife, actress Megan Park (Grace from “The Secret Life of the American Teenager”), identified with the song, which hovers in a more roots music arena than much of Hilton’s work, as well. She ended up directing its powerful music video.

“I just thought it would be a Tyler song that tickled my own fancy. For her to connect to it – and she’s not a country music person – and come up with all these videos ideas and get her dancer friends involved. It snowballed,” says Hilton. “She pictured a video about empowerment and the frustration women had been feeling and put that with ancient tribal dancing, which totally connected to the Native-American rootsy sounds I’d been getting into – these ancient guttural sounding songs that come from deep emotional places.”

The song became the centerpiece of the album, but it’s not the only weighty track. “How Long `Til I Lose You” was initially triggered by a friend’s divorce, but morphed into a song about mortality after the death of a high school friend.

“I got this text while I was writing in the studio, and I was totally devastated. I ended up writing the bridge about her and taking the song in another direction. So it’s about death and relationships, but also about the concept of not if, but when,” says Hilton, who performed at her funeral in Las Vegas. “They fit so well with what was going on.”

Focusing on “City of Fire” hasn’t meant putting film and TV on the backburner though. Hilton reunites with fellow “One Tree Hill” alums Hilarie Burton, Robert Buckley, Daneel Ackles, and Antwon Tanner in Lifetime’s “The Christmas Contract,” which premieres on Thanksgiving followed by “`Tis the Season: A One Tree Hill Cast Reunion” special.

Fans of long-running television shows, especially ones they grew up with, like to imagine the series’ stars are as close as their characters. Hilton says, the bond formed by the “Tree” cast while filming in Wilmington from 2003-2012 remains.

“We met when I was 19 or 20 – real formidable years where your friends matter most to you and your away from your family,” says Hilton, who played ego-driven musician Chris Keller. “I wonder if that’s why we got so close and stayed so close. There’s a lot of drama and competition on TV show sets. It was never that way with us. We had no home or friends to go back to like there is in LA. There was a real go-team mentality. In the beginning we hung out every night and every time the show would air we’d have a watch party.”

Key words: tyler Hilton, one tree hill, Wilmington, nc film, tv, the cw, the wb, teen drama, walk the line, grace park, charlotte music, free range brewing, charlotte concert