Blackberry Smoke to play Freeman Arts Pavilion Sept. 10

Blackberry Smoke will perform a concert at 7 p.m., Friday, Sept. 10, at Freeman Arts Pavilion in Selbyville.

Throughout the band’s 20-year career, playing live has been its lifeblood, so being forced off of the road by the pandemic was hard.

“It’s a tough habit to kick, playing music in front of people,” said singer, guitarist and main songwriter Charlie Starr. “Before we even started to do those kinds of shows, my buddy Benji [Shanks, a touring guitarist with Blackberry Smoke] and I were playing for my neighbors in my backyard.”

In fact, when the Atlanta-based group formed in 2000, getting the chance to tour and play shows was their goal, and it has remained the band’s focus ever since. “We knew what we could control was taking our music on the road and playing for people, the most important thing,” Starr said. “You’re making music to please yourself as a musician, and you’re hoping that these people will buy it so you can make a living.”

Blackberry Smoke did play some socially distanced and drive-in concerts last fall, and now, the band is headlining an outdoor tour that runs into October. And fans can expect some surprises in the set list. “We kind of just switch it up night to night,” Starr said. “But we will be adding new songs from the new record, and that’s always exciting for the band because it’s the freshest, newest material.”

The new album, released in late May, is called “You Hear Georgia.” The band, which also includes Paul Jackson on guitar, Richard Turner on bass, Brit Turner on drums and Brandon Still on keyboards, had planned to make a new album last year, but the pandemic pushed it back a couple of months.

This delay actually benefited the album, which was recorded in just one week. It gave Starr time to write more songs, a few of which, he said, supplanted some earlier-chosen tunes. One new song was “All Rise Again,” a stout, soulful rocker Starr co-wrote with Warren Haynes of Gov’t Mule and the Allman Brothers Band.

Another new addition was the title song, a response to the demeaning stereotypes often associated with the South and the people who call it home. It was written the night before the last day of recording, after producer Dave Cobb, who heard Starr fiddling with the first-verse lines, urged him to finish it. “And Dave Cobb, I think he said you should call the album that, and it was just kind of an aha moment with all of us,” Starr said. “Everything went so well and then to end on that sort of a bang was ‘Yeah man, you’re exactly right.’”

The rest of “You Hear Georgia” demonstrates the band’s versatility, while still showing Blackberry Smoke as a true rock ’n’ roll band. There’s “Hey Delilah,” a poppier tune laced with funk, and a pure country song called ”Lonesome For A Livin,” featuring guest vocals from Jamey Johnson, plus “Old Enough To Know,” a stripped-back, gentle ballad.

Starr feels the new album, like each successive Blackberry Smoke album, finds the band growing musically and crafting song sets that are a bit more cohesive.

“The focus is a little clearer, I think, with each one,” Starr said. “I hope the songwriting has grown. I feel like it has. There are aspects of our first couple of records that I still love dearly, that – you know, youth and exuberance. But then I put on ‘You Hear Georgia,’ and there are songs where I’m like – we can still lay it down like we did when we were in our 20s.”