Zac Brown Band goes back in time

CONCERTS

Its tour arrives with a smaller feel and more country-leaning recent songs

Country act the Zac Brown Band is playing a number of songs from its most recent release, last year’s “The Comeback,” on the tour that brings the band to the Hollywood Bowl tonight. PHOTO BY DANNY CLINCH

Brown, shown earlier this year, is kicking off shows with a sparser, quieter approach evoking the band’s early days playing clubs and smaller venues. JASON KEMPIN — GETTY IMAGES

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By Alan Sculley

Correspondent

Zac Brown Band’s current tour is not only an opportunity to showcase its latest album, “The Comeback,” which was released last year, but it’s using these shows to take fans on a trip through the stunning rise from playing clubs in Atlanta to amphitheaters, arenas and stadiums across the country.

“This is probably the most intimate tour that we’ve ever done in the sense that we start out kind of how we started out as a band,” guitarist and keyboard player Coy Bowles said during a Zoom interview ahead of the band’s appearance at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles tonight, and headlining the first night of the three-day Wonderfront Festival in San Diego on Nov. 18.

“We start out with this bar vibe and Zac [onstage], and it kind of unfolds the way our career did,” he continued. “And Zac is doing more storytelling and more kind of just filling the crowd in on how we all came together. I mean, I don’t come on until a couple of songs in. Every night, the stories change just a little bit, and it’s always just really cool to hear Zac talk about how this whole thing came together because it is such a wild ride. We’re so blessed. We’re a bunch of Southern boys who had a big dream and it came true, man. So hearing it kind of spoken out and played out the way it unfolds onstage is really cool for our audience and ourselves.”

The approach to the show makes sense, considering “The Comeback,” with its songs that lean decidedly country, is being considered a return to the group’s musical roots, which is an assessment Bowles didn’t dispute. He credited Ben Simonetti, who with Brown wrote many of the songs and produced the album, with helping guide the band through the making of “The Comeback” and achieving Brown’s vision for it.

“It was kind of like the original recipe: great songs that Zac had his heart into and the band helping support that with musicianship,” Bowles said. “We were trying to sound like the Zac Brown Band, and it really worked.”

Fiddle player Jimmy De Martini, who joined Bowles for the Zoom interview, feels the isolation of the pandemic also played a part in the musical direction of the record and the return to the sound that first brought the group success. When the members arrived to record the album, they had been apart for more than a year.

“It felt so good to see these guys. It felt so good to be a band again,” De Martini said. “I think that’s what lends itself to the old-style sound, is we were back together again, and we had such a break and maybe we had taken [things] for granted and we were just happy to be together again.”

The Zac Brown Band originally formed — one musician at a time — around singer-guitarist Brown, who by the early ’00s was already starting to attract an audience in the Atlanta area. De Martini was the first recruit for the Zac Brown Band, joining in 2004. Bassist and multi-instrumentalist John Driskell Hopkins — a longtime friend of Brown’s — joined in 2005, followed by Bowles and then drummer Chris Fryar to form the core of the early lineup.

In 2008, the band signed to Live Nation Records and then got a distribution deal with major label Atlantic Records. “Chicken Fried” was released as the first single off the 2008 Atlantic-distributed album “The Foundation.” Within a month, the song had topped the country singles chart. Three more singles — “Toes,” “Highway 20 Ride” and “Free” — followed “Chicken Fried” to No. 1.

And just like that, the Zac Brown Band had arrived on the national stage. With guitarist-keyboardist Clay Cook joining in 2009, the band got to work on its next album, “You Get What You Give.” Released in 2010, it went triple platinum and confirmed that the initial success was no fluke. The band has released five more studio albums while notching 10 more No. 1 singles and branching out musically from its country foundation to touch on a variety of other styles, including hard rock, pop and even EDM and hip-hop. Along the way, the band added percussionist Daniel de los Reyes and bassist Matt Mangano, and guitarist-singer Caroline Jones is currently onboard as a guest band member.

While the pandemic interrupted the band’s usual schedule of touring, the forced free time to make “The Comeback” proved to be productive. De Martini said the new songs will figure fairly strongly in the set lists of this latest tour.

“We’re playing a lot of new songs, which is always fun for us,” he said. “The newer songs are the most fun for us to play just because we haven’t played them that much and it’s a challenge. But we have a big back catalog of songs, so we’re able to play a lot of old songs, a lot of fan favorites, a lot of sing-alongs. Then we can also mix in some of the newer songs, and we have some surprise cover songs that we always like to pull out, too.”