Chris Stapleton Tributes Las Vegas Victims, Drops New Album News at Nashville Gig [Watch]
Chris Stapleton gave the hometown fans a very special show on Friday night (Oct. 13) at his gig in Nashville, paying special tribute to the Las Vegas shooting victims and revealing news of his next album onstage.
Stapleton performed at the Bridgestone Arena in Music City as part of his All-American Road Show, and he was just a few songs into the set when he told the audience, "You guys know it's been a pretty tough week-and-a-half for some of the people out in Las Vegas. I wanted to play this for them," before launching into "Broken Halos," the second single from his most recent project, the CMA Awards Album of the Year nominee From A Room: Vol. 1. Perhaps more than any other song of the night, it showcased the special vocal blend between Stapleton and his wife Morgane, who was with him onstage Friday night as always to provide high-octane harmony vocals. Watch that electrifying moment in the video above.
Stapleton also paid tribute to Tom Petty, a musician he called his "hero," with an acoustic rendition of "Learning to Fly," recalling that when he opened for the rock legend, the last thing Petty said to him was, "I hope we get to do more."
"I'm so sad we won't get to do more," Stapleton lamented.
The Grammy-winning singer-songwriter also dropped news of his next album, From A Room: Vol. 2, which is the second part of the two-album cycle he began with the release of his current album in May. That album is set for release on Dec. 1, and Stapleton shared one of the new songs, "Midnight Train to Memphis," during the show Friday in another highlight.
Stapleton seemed to have Vegas on his mind still later in the performance, when he asked the audience to join him to sing after an incendiary performance of "Fire Away."
"Let's sing this chorus so loud it drowns out all the hate in the world," Stapleton urged, and the fans in Nashville tried to do exactly that, holding up their lighted cell phones and singing enthusiastically to create a magical concert moment.
Stapleton's headlining debut at the Bridgestone followed a very capable support set from Brent Cobb, whose swampy, earthy blues-country went over well with the Nashville crowd, and a set from Brothers Osborne that was highlighted by John Osborne's incendiary guitar playing and a special appearance from his wife, Lucie Silvas.
Other highlights of Stapleton's performance Friday included a brief snippet of Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Tuesday's Gone," which morphed into his own "Devil Named Music." He included "Them Stems," "Death Row" and an acoustic cover of "Whiskey & You," a song he wrote that Tim McGraw recorded. His closing song, almost inevitably, was "Tennessee Whiskey," the country classic that helped catapult him into the country music stratosphere when he performed it on the 2015 CMA Awards with Justin Timberlake.
Remembering the days when he first came to Nashville and managed to score scalped tickets to a Fleetwood Mac gig at the Bridgestone, Stapleton told the hometown crowd that he can't believe how far he's come since then.
"I never dreamed I would play here," he mused, causing the crowd to roar.
Stapleton and his band will return to the Bridgestone on Saturday night (Oct. 14) for the second of two sold-out Nashville shows.
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