After Peach Fest, Blackberry Smoke rocks Sherman Theater in Stroudsburg on Sept. 21
From a press release:
Following their return to the annual Peach Music Festival in Scranton in July, Southern rock band Blackberry Smoke will perform at the Sherman Theater in Stroudsburg on Friday, Sept. 21 at 8 p.m. with special guests The Quaker City Night Hawks.
Tickets, which are $29.50 in advance or $32 the day of the show, are on sale now and available through the Sherman Theater box office (524 Main St., Stroudsburg) and online at shermantheater.com and ticketfly.com. VIP boxes and sky boxes are available for this show and include eight tickets (VIP box) or 12 tickets (sky box), a fruit and cheese platter, and waitstaff. To purchase box seats, call the theater at 570-420-2808.
Pigeonholing Blackberry Smoke has never been easy. Since emerging from Atlanta in the early 2000s, the quintet – vocalist/lead guitarist Charlie Starr, guitarist/vocalist Paul Jackson, bassist/vocalist Richard Turner, drummer Brit Turner, and keyboardist Brandon Still – has become known for a singular sound indebted to classic rock, blues, country, and folk.
This fluidity has paid off handsomely in the form of two Billboard chart-topping country albums, 2015’s “Holding All the Roses” and 2016’s “Like an Arrow.” (For good measure, the latter also topped Billboard’s Americana/Folk album chart.)
“Find a Light,” Blackberry Smoke’s sixth studio album, doubles down on diversity. Songs hew toward easygoing roots rock (“Run Away from It All”) and Southern rock stomps (“The Crooked Kind”), as well as stripped-down acoustic numbers (“I’ve Got This Song”) and bruising alt-country (“Nobody Gives a Damn”). Rich instrumental flourishes – keening fiddle, solemn organ, and bar band piano boogie – add further depth and resonance.
“That’s one of my favorite things about Blackberry Smoke albums – there’s a lot of variety,” Starr says. “My favorite albums through the years are built that way, too. I love a record that keeps you guessing. I love the fact that our records are sort of a ride, with different types of songs and different vibes.”
Within Blackberry Smoke’s catalog, “Find a Light” is distinctive in several notable ways. The record sounds heavier than other albums; in fact, Starr characterizes the churning, scorched-blues album opener, “Flesh and Bone,” as “maybe the heaviest song we’ve ever recorded.” The title has deep significance to the record’s overarching themes.
“Most of our albums have been named either for a song on the album or a lyric, and this time I didn’t want to do that,” Starr says. “I thought, ‘What headspace is humanity in as a whole?’ That’s pretty hard to argue with that. I think everybody is hoping and looking for something better right now.”
Accordingly, “Find a Light’s” lyrics portray characters weighed down by the pressures of everyday life. “Flesh and Bone” explores the conundrum of temptation, “Run Away from It All” is about seizing the day and trying to leave troubles behind, and “Nobody Gives a Damn” cautions about letting external achievements such as an attractive partner or a hit song go to one’s head.
“Inspiration comes from so many different places,” Starr says. “A lot of inspiration can be drawn from current events these days and how complicated the world is.”
Yet “Find a Light’s” hard-luck characters are soldiering forward despite it all and remain buoyed by optimism – and deep faith in themselves. “One of these days I’ll get the best seat in the house / It’s the measure of a man, of a man,” goes the jangly “Best Seat in the House,” while the narrator of “I’ve Got a Song” asserts, “At the end of the day, it’s the one thing they can’t take away: I’ve got this song.” The album’s final song, “Mother Mountain,” focuses on the belief that redemption and rebirth are always within reach.
“It felt good to write that song,” Starr says of the latter. “I don’t write a whole lot of songs like that – the really optimistic, yearning for something better kind of a song. The album’s called ‘Find a Light,’ and that song is sort of a plea, as far as that goes.”
Starr switched into writing mode for “Find a Light” thanks to impromptu songwriting sessions he had with his friend Keith Nelson, formerly of the band Buckcherry. The men had never collaborated before but found an instant creative connection. In fact, Starr ended up using four songs from their time together, including “Run Away from It All,” “Nobody Gives a Damn,” and “Best Seat in the House.”
“At some point, I told him, ‘Man, I really like these songs for Blackberry Smoke. These are Blackberry Smoke songs,'” Starr says. “He didn’t disagree. I hadn’t really started to write for another album yet, so these lit the fire, so to speak.”
Blackberry Smoke spent a little over two weeks recording “Find a Light” in Atlanta with engineer/mixer Tom Tapley and longtime collaborator Benji Shanks. As with 2016’s “Like an Arrow,” the band self-produced the record. “With these two albums, we really knew what we wanted them to sound like and what kind of record we wanted to make,” Starr says. “It was a pretty easy decision to say, ‘Hey, let’s do it ourselves.’”
That confident vision informed the band’s decision to have several guest musicians appear on the album. The brisk, gospel-tinged Southern rocker “I’ll Keep Ramblin’“ features the song’s co-writer, Robert Randolph, adding frantic pedal steel, while the psychedelic-tinted folk elegy “Mother Mountain” blooms with The Wood Brothers’ inimitable harmonies.
“As we were recording that song, I was singing it, and from the very beginning of that song – even in its embryonic stage – I wanted it to be a three-part harmony all the way through,” Starr says. “I asked The Wood Brothers because I love their vocal blend. They’re fantastic harmony singers.”
Another Keith Nelson co-write, the easygoing “Let Me Down Easy,” features Amanda Shires shading Starr’s vocals with her clarion twang. “I thought it would be really cool to have a female harmony on this song, sort of a Gram Parsons-Emmylou Harris kind of thing,” Starr explains. “And Amanda came to mind. Her voice is so cool, so genuine and unique.”
At its core, “Find a Light” illustrates the efficiency and chemistry of Blackberry Smoke’s instrumentalists, who have no trouble translating the band’s loose live shows into crisp studio recordings. “We always record together,” Starr says. “That’s what bands do. And you go in and listen and think, ‘Wow. How did that happen? What just happened? That was magic. That was magical. Can we do that again?’
“I’m always blown away by my bandmates’ sympathy for the song,” he adds. “We all agree that that’s the way to be in this band is to play for the song – the song is the vehicle.”
This commitment to putting the music first above all other considerations is one reason Blackberry Smoke has continued to evolve during their time together. And it also explains why “Find a Light’s” sonic progressions and expansions sound so effortless.
“We didn’t want to repeat ourselves,” Starr says. “I don’t ever want to make a record that ourselves or are fans are like, ‘It’s the same old thing.’ But I still get a real lift from listening to ‘Find a Light,’ even after multiple listens. I really am proud of the work that we accomplished.”
The Quaker City Night Hawks’ brand of hard rock ‘n’ roll is bred from Texas boogie, Memphis soul, and heavy blues. Their music is Southern rock right out of 1975, played with the fervor of a sermon crackling out of the radio in a ’68 Lincoln. They’re the whiskey bottle you finished Saturday night and the prayer you said the next morning. Like a country gunshot on a humid night and your first illicit beer, Quaker City Night Hawks are the spirit of rock ‘n’ roll that makes you shake your hips.
See NEPA Scene’s photos of Blackberry Smoke performing at the 2018 Peach Fest here.
