With SEE THE LIGHT, the world is finally getting to see the real Bo Bice.

Don't worry; that wasn't an imposter who was named "American Idol's" Season 4 runner-up in 2005. But the Bo Bice people saw on the show and heard on the subsequent gold-certified album THE REAL THING was just a taste of the broad and deep spectrum of music the Alabama-born singer has a passionate drive to write and sing. On SEE THE LIGHT, the first release on Sugar Money/ StratArt Records label, he promises we are getting to hear "the genuine Bo."

"I'm grateful for THE REAL THING; that was a fun album. But that wasn't MY album," Bo explains. "This time it was just total freedom. We had no inhibitions about what this was going to be; we just went in and did whatever we wanted to. The freedom shines through."

SEE THE LIGHT is the kind of classic American album that's heard all too rarely in these days of careful calculation and tight formatting. Bo is the kind of artist who can't find enough musical roads to travel, and he demonstrates it on this broad-reaching 10-song set that spans the crunchy, Southern-fried rock of "This Train," "Got Money" and "Whiskey, Women & Time," the funky groove of "Witness," the swampy soul of "Take the Country Out of Me" and stark, emotional ballads such as "Only Words," "Sinner in a Sin" and "I'm Gone."

"I really feel like this is a diverse album," says Bo. "On a lot of the stuff some artists release, they just put different words to the same song. People get bored. And I think people are figuring that out; they're like, 'Wow, there's three good songs here, and the rest are the same song with different lyrics.'

"So on this album I felt, like, don't be afraid to deviate. Don't be afraid to play a little country. Don't be afraid to play something that makes people say, 'Why is this on this album?' Because in some twisted way, it fits. That's the main thing we've got going for us, just the diversity of it."

Bo comes by that ...