Monthly Archives: September 2011

Take a look at rehearsals & the first week of the CMT Tour. There’s also a secret to this episode, can you find it?

What an exciting year it’s been thanks to all of YOU!! ‘Tailgates & Tanlines’ has soared to the top, and my tour schedule has been so crazy… but we couldn’t go without squeezing in the Farm Tour for another year!

I’ve teamed up with PledgeMusic so all of you can experience this tour, including a special 6-song acoustic tour bus session, and a stream of video, music, photo, and blog updates. We’ve also created some limited edition items and experiences for you to choose from, and the proceeds that you pledge will go directly to the Farm Tour Scholarship fund for a student from a farming family attending a local college in each community where the shows are taking place.

The tour runs from September 29th until October 7th, and this campaign will run from mid September through October… there’s just 45 days to get involved… but from day 1, we’ll be treating you to exclusive behind the scenes footage… For Pledgers Only!

I truly think that this is the most rewarding way for us to join forces, release some cool music, and to help some students build their futures by attending college. I can’t wait to see everyone on the road… and for everyone who can make, you’ll get to experience the madness through my private updates!

I appreciate ya’ll pledging! Let’s make this big!

-Luke

Luke Bryan would love to never sing “Sweet Home Alabama” again. In People’s recent country issue, he said he’s been covering the song for 20 years. (No offense to Lynyrd Skynyrd, the original artist, or to Neil Young, who is mentioned in a disparaging way in the song.) Bryan also says, “I don’t care what anybody says” about his love for Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance,” which he likes to sing in his car. Bryan also lists the song currently in his head (Taylor Swift’s “Mean”), the first album he ever bought (Michael Jackson’s Thriller) and his dream duet partner (Sugarland’s Jennifer Nettles). And then when the magazine asks him what song would be the soundtrack to his life, he says, “‘Whiskey Bent and Hell Bound.” He adds, “Well, no, not the hell-bound part. That’s a little scary. Make it ‘A Country Boy Can Survive.’” Am I the only one who’s thrilled he didn’t pick “Country Girl (Shake It for Me)” as his life’s soundtrack?

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Luke Bryan is set to bring his Farm Tour 2011 to the Campus Beach and Recreation Center at Clemson University at 7 p.m. Sept. 29. The tour, now in its third season, typically plays in open fields on farms across the South. But in Clemson, the best spot to play is at the Campus Beach.

Bryan, an award-winning country singer-songwriter from Georgia, has had many chart-topping hits, including “Rain is a Good Thing” and “All My Friends Say.” His latest single, “Country Girl (Shake it for Me),” is the first from his new album, “Tailgates & Tanlines,” which was released in August. The album has risen to the No. 1 spot on the country music charts and No. 2 on the Billboard 200.

The idea for the Farm Tour concerts came from Bryan as a way to give back to local farming communities by celebrating and lifting up American farmers and offering a fun escape with outdoor shows. Proceeds from the Farm Tour are used for scholarships in rural communities.

“Clemson worked with Bryan’s management to adapt the tour to play at a campus venue. Clemson’s connection to the fans and ties to agriculture made this a good fit,” said Littlejohn Coliseum general manager Zachary Kerns. “The outdoor festival feel, including food vendors and sponsors, will add to the fun.”

The event is open to the public, and parking is free. Tickets are on sale at the Hendrix Student Center box office and on TicketMaster.com, or call Zach Kerns at (864) 656-5006 or email: zachark@clemson.edu, or Angela Nixon at (864) 656-0382, or email: anixon@clemson.edu

The Campus Beach and Recreation Area is located at Lake Hartwell, off of S.C. 93 at the site of the YMCA.

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Better than: Having to go out to PNC Bank Arts Center, where these all-star country shows usually take place.

In a town where the “but country” that finishes the trusty declaration of openmindedness “I listen to everything” is almost implied, a New York Times feature is usually enough to shift, if not create entirely, the discourse around any Nashville artist. Which is probably why Luke Bryan—the center of a Labor Day weekend piece about country singers ditching the 10-gallon hat, and the hyper-masculine attitude that comes with it—has become, among the few people I know who knew his name, “the hat guy.”
However, the crowd at Terminal 5, almost completely assembled a good two hours before Bryan would take the stage, didn’t seem too hung up on the headliner’s sartorial choices and remained remarkably excited for opener Lee Brice, whose low placement on Friday’s bill belies the excellence of his debut, Love Like Crazy; its title track was one of the biggest country songs of 2010, breaking the record for most weeks on the Billboard country singles chart. So naturally, Brice closed with a scaled-down rendition of the tune that put him on the map before turning the stage over to Josh Thompson.

Thompson joins Brice and Bryan in the shirking the 10-gallon, and just as Bryan occasionally moderates this move by appropriating hip-hop’s masculine swagger (as on “Country Girl (Shake it for Me)” or by outright asserting his rural, XY roots (as on “Country Man”), Thompson wears his hair in, yes, a ponytail, but also proclaims his love for three Johns (Wayne, Cash, and Deere, respectively) in a way that’s about as masculine as you can get without ripping the sleeves off your flannel shirt while your buddies slap your abs and biceps. Which, as it turned out, was exactly what the dudes in front of me happened to be doing as I took these notes. (These dudes seemed to prefer Brice, as did I, but they no problem getting down to that Johns song, “Way Out Here.”)

When Bryan arrived on stage, he appeared above all else happy to be there, playing little guitar so that he could have more freedom to run, jump, and dance. And though he’s no Hayley Williams, no one faulted him these energetic displays. Catching his breath before “Drunk on You,” he laughed off the endearingly clumsy skateboard accident he suffered on his last trip to New York, when he and some buddies bought a few and tried to ride them through Central Park: “A redneck on a skateboard, how ’bout that?”

Bryan’s 2009 single “Do I” seemed as if it might provide the singer with another chance to rest, but by the time I had written the song’s two-word title in my notebook, he was already walking away from the piano behind which he initially sat. In fact, “Do I” only began the set-closing run of songs that would turn out to be the night’s most lively segment. “I Don’t Want This Night to End” followed, suggesting that Bryan had at least a song or two left to play. Those songs turned out to be, respectively, “All My Friends Say” and “Rain is a Good Thing,” the former interrupted by brief detour though Metallica’s “Enter Sandman,” the latter punctuated by a massive thunder-and-lighting lights display.

For an encore, Bryan brought out the aforementioned “Country Girl (Shake it for Me),” but rather than moderating his baseball cap move away from outlaw masculinity, the tune provided a chance for Bryan to really mess with expectations. Disappointed by the lack of males backing that azz up, Bryan goofily shook his own before singing lines from Rihanna’s “What’s My Name” and Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It).” His band, however, had other ideas, launching into Poison’s “Nothin’ But a Good Time.” (I imagine that Brice, who on “Picture of Me” sings of “finding his soul in rock ‘n’ roll” and had offered a few face-to-face dueling guitar solos earlier in the night, was backstage having a ball.) But before the song could finish, the band took another left turn, ending up in the middle of Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance,” and though Bryan might have confused the bridge’s “revenge/friends” rhyme, he still gets some serious points for trying.

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