Kane Brown brings eclectic mix to town

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This article was published 09/12/2022 (1420 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Country music is riding high these days and so is its hottest new star, Kane Brown.

The 29-year-old from Nashville and north Georgia showed Thursday night at Canada Life Centre that he might be known as a country singer, he knows a lot about arena-rock theatrics too.

While laser-lights flickered to begin the concert, Brown emerged from a trap door built into the catwalk part of a stage that jutted out into the crowd on the arena floor, just the beginning of many ways he interacted with his young fans.

Pots at the back of a glittery stage fired flames into the air and a giant video screen showed slick videos while he sang, skipped and pranced to all corners of the stage.

The screen even had subtitles on a couple of tunes so folks who didn’t know all the words could still join in.

Brown can also do the unconventional, stopping the music midway through his Winnipeg debut to tell his origin story, a sort of TED talk for almost 10,000 people about growing up in a trailer park, coping with domestic abuse at home and racism at school.

Brown’s mother is white and his father is Black, and he told the audience it was difficult to find someone who would accept him as he was.

“Back in the 90s, I was too dark to hang out with the whites, and I was too white hang out with the Blacks,” he said.

In between the special effects and his effective storytelling was some hard-charging music.

Brown might receive awards from country-music organizations but like his background, his music is a combination of different cultures: a little bit of country, a little bit of rock ‘n’ roll, and even some R&B and hip-hop thrown in for good measure.

Three songs early on in Thursday’s show — Short Skirt Weather, Hometown and Like I Love Country Music — are classic country themes about summertime parties while respecting your family and small-town values, accompanied by a six-piece band cranking out sounds from the hard-rock days of the 1980s.

Brown name-checks George Jones, Willie Nelson and Johnny Cash in Like I Love Country Music, but the tune’s rhythm and guitar solos are straight out of the Van Halen songbook.

A few songs later, Brown apologized to the crowd for delivering some bad news. His wife Katelyn couldn’t make it to Winnipeg to join him for their touching duet Thank God, which describes how they met and maintain their trust and love for each other.

He played it anyway, along to a recording of his wife’s part, and many of his fans helped out too, and Brown thanked them helping the hit be the memorable moment it’s meant to be.

The show ended with with blasts of smoke and fire and soaring guitars during What Ifs, but throughout all that, the biggest applause of the night happened when Brown finished signing autographs for folks near the stage and ripped off his tank top, revealing his buffed and tattooed bod.

Brown was making waves on YouTube in 2013, but in less than a decade, he’s become one of music’s most bankable stars, appearing on the Academy of Country Music Awards and a halftime show for a National Football League game on Thanksgiving Day.

His next TV venture is next Tuesday, when he performs in the season finale for The Voice, when he is expected to perform Different Man, the title track to his recently released album, with Blake Shelton, a country giant from an earlier generation, who’s one of the show’s judges.

Jessie James Decker, who performed prior to Brown, has also made a mark on reality TV, most recently with an appearance on Dancing With the Stars, showed plenty of moves on stage but her voice was often drowned out by muddy-sounding guitars and drums from her band

Between tunes, she told the crowd she got into showbiz because of country giant Shania Twain, and paid tribute to the Timmins, Ont., singer with her version of Man, I Feel Like a Woman, with her fans supplying the vocals for the hit’s famous chorus.

Restless Road, a Nashville-based trio that competed on the talent TV show X-Factor in 2013, had no such problems with a guitarist and drums drowning out their nice three-part harmonies.

They performed a combination of rockin’ country and power ballads during their 30-minute set, such as Growing Old With You and a new one, On My Way, which the band provided QR codes on the video screens for their fans to pre-order.

They added some classic covers that show how vast the musical tent that country music has become in the 2020s. They sang a country standard, John Denver’s Take Me Home, Country Roads, the state song of West Virginia, where Restless Roads’ Colton Pack grew up, and later they rocked out with the Def Leppard light-metal anthem Pour Some Sugar on Me like they’ve always belonged in the same setlist.

Alan.Small@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @AlanDSmall