The Best Laid Plans

The sleeping giant is waking up. As soon as the Easter Bunny left town the concert makers rode in in the form of Eric Church and his very ambitious 55-city arena tour and Kane Brown’s 35-city Blessed & Free arena tour.

Kane went to Dallas at The American Airlines Center to announce that he was going to play all 29 NBA arenas. This has to be a Country first. Kane is one of the few Country artists to ever sell out L.A.’s Staples Center.

Just this week, Alan Jackson postponed an arena show that was set for May at Nashville’s Bridgestone Arena. The show was moved to October. Nashville is not wide open, at least not yet.

Church says this tour has been planned like a moon mission. I’m sure they have worked very hard, but this is going to take a lot of luck to be able to pull off these arena shows with all the different cities all the different protocols. The amphitheater shows that are planned for dozens of artists might be a little easier to pull off.

So it’s very impressive and everybody is wishing them great speed and success on their missions to get concerts back onstage.

Another big, ambitious event will be the Grand Prix … make that the Big Machine Music City Grand Prix, set for August 6th through the 8th in downtown Nashville.. This event will see Indy cars racing around downtown and, for the first time, they will be racing across a body of water, two different bridges over the Cumberland River.

With the annual Iroquois Steeplechase in June and the Fourth of July celebration downtown, the city of Nashville really hopes the Covid is going to be gone or under such control that these events can go off without a hitch.

Brad Paisley and his wife Kimberly are on the cover of People magazine this week talking about their marriage and how they keep it together thanks to laughter. They are also celebrating the first year operation of their nonprofit grocery store, The Store, near Nashville’s Belmont University.

From the “We don’t know exactly why department,” Vince Gill is selling a lot of his guitars at Gruhn Guitar downtown. Did I see a $50,000 price and above on a few gems?

Outside the flowers are blooming, the pollen is spreading and so many people have come up for air that we haven’t heard from in over a year. Zac Brown and his band are doing a livestream coming soon from his recording studio on Music Row. And good to see artist Clay Walker putting out a new album in July.

Spring is the time for rebirth, and let’s hope we see it sooner than later.