The Mavericks brought their Latin-infused brand of country music/rockabilly/Americana (there are so many genres and subgenres of music these days and this group fits these and more) to the beautiful Rialto Square Theatre in Joliet, Ill. on Thursday, May 18.
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As an out-of-towner seeing the show on vacation, this was my first experience at the Rialto Square Theatre and it’s without a doubt the most picturesque venue I’ve ever seen a live show at. The venue opened nearly 100 years ago in 1926 and was originally designed and operated as a vaudeville movie palace. It’s designed in the Neo-Baroque style and according to the American Institute of Architects it’s considered one of the “150 great places in Illinois.” The theatre was renovated in the late 1970s and now hosts concerts, musicals, plays and stand-up comedy.

The Mavericks seem like a perfect band for such a wonderful theatre and they put on one helluva show musically, though I was disappointed in the vocal sound – which I’m not sure if that was a venue issue or a soundboard issue having never seen a show at the Rialto Square Theatre before. But it made many of Raul Malo’s vocals a bit unintelligible, especially on songs I didn’t know as well and those with a more country-rock or rockabilly vibe. The words were much easier to make out on ballads like “Blue Moon” and “Amsterdam Moon,” which really show off Malo’s vocals. Malo has often reminded me of a modern-day Roy Orbison with his silky smooth voice.

The group opened their two-hour set with “All Night Long,” one of the highlights on their 2015 album Mono. It immediately got the crowd energized for what was ahead of them during the evening.

The crowd was interesting for me as it was mostly age 50 and older and white, which maybe isn’t too surprising given the more upscale style of the venue and the age of the band – they’ve been around almost 35 years and have styles of music that skew toward older audiences – but I figured there might be a more eclectic audience for The Mavericks. I especially figured there’d be more Latin flavor to the audience. Again, I was an out-of-towner for Joliet, but driving through the area it seemed to have a decent Hispanic demographic and a basic Google search shows the city to have an almost 34 percent Hispanic population. Ultimately, the demographics of the audience have no impact on the performance, but I found it noteworthy in its surprise.

The Mavericks charted 13 times on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart during the ‘90s, so I had known some of their stuff as a younger man. Surprisingly the group never had a top-10 country hit. But the band’s terrific 2013 release In Time really familiarized me with their work.

The group would perform seven tracks from that album on Thursday night, including the aforementioned “Amsterdam Moon,” “Forgive Me,” and some obvious crowd favorites in “As Long as There’s Loving Tonight,” “Dance in the Moonlight” and “Back in Your Arms Again.”

The band would perform a couple of numbers from their Spanish-language album En Español, from 2020, which some in the audience, unfortunately, took as the time to use the restroom or get refreshments. Though I don’t speak Spanish and didn’t understand a word (so it truly wasn’t much different from some of the other songs throughout the night) “La Sitiera” and “Recuerdos” sounded nice musically.

The Mavericks saved my favorite two performances of the evening for their encore.

They opened with “Come Unto Me,” which is my favorite track on In Time. It’s a song I’ve always wanted to see the group perform live and have often said it has such power to it, especially Malo’s vocal, that it makes me want to fight a bull as if I were a matador.

The group finished its set with an awesome performance of their biggest charting hit, “All You Ever Do is Bring Me Down,” which hit No. 13 on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart in 1996 from the group’s 1995 album Music for All Occasions.

Malo is one of the best vocalists in any genre of music, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out the other fantastic members of The Mavericks. Eddie Perez plays a masterful lead guitar in the band, alongside Malo also on guitar. Paul Deakin holds things down on the drums and Jerry Dale McFadden plays the keyboard and has an awful lot of fun doing so, always grooving along with the sound. Malo and Deakin are original members. McFadden joined the band in 1994 and Perez in 2003. The group also has a horn section that really puts on a show consisting of saxophonist Max Abrams and trumpeters Julio Diaz and Lorenzo Molina. But the group member who dropped jaws the most on Thursday night was probably accordionist Percy Cardona, who makes the instrument look sexy.  

 
Many people may not have known the name of Iowan country music singer-songwriter Hailey Whitters before Saturday night’s performance at the annual Toad Suck Daze Festival in Conway, Ark. but she certainly had them eating out of the palm of their hands by the end of her 75-minute set.

Fifteen years from now those in attendance on the Conway square on Saturday night might be able to tell their friends and family, “I saw Hailey Whitters back before she blew up,” just like past Toad Suck Daze Festival goers could say today about now huge artists like Miranda Lambert, Blake Shelton and Little Big Town.

Whitters, from the tiny town of Shueyville, Iowa, has released three albums in her career thus far, the independent 2015 release Black Sheep and two well-reviewed albums in the last three years: 2020’s The Dream and last year’s Raised.  

Whitters, who has already been nominated for a major Grammy Award in 2022 for her co-write on the Alicia Keys/Brandi Carlile collaboration “A Beautiful Noise,” is up for her first Academy of Country Music (ACM) Award next week for New Female Artist of the Year.

Whitters opened her show Saturday night in downtown Conway with the title track from her latest album for the crowd that was a mixture of some who knew her (one big fan really enjoying herself in the front row even coming from Texas for the show), those hearing of her for the first time and festival goers stopping by amidst their stroll between grabbing freshly squeezed lemonade, corndogs and other carnival type foods.

I don’t usually pay attention to the fashion choices of the artists I see in concert, but I absolutely adored that Whitters chose to wear a beautiful lime green dress for a performance at a festival named after an amphibian.

Having only three albums – and two that have been what I’d consider major releases – Whitters was able to showcase much of her current discography on Saturday night and it’s pretty impressive for someone who’s only 33 years old (though she said she had been in Nashville working odd jobs and trying to make it big for a dozen years before she made it). It’s even more impressive that she seems to have a hand in writing nearly all of her tracks and has worked with many of Nashville’s best songwriters like Brandy Clark, Lori McKenna and Shane McAnally on co-writes.

Whitters had the opportunity to perform an incredible eight tracks off Raised, more than half of the album on Saturday night. Among my favorite performances from that album were “Plain Jane,” “Big Family,” and “Middle of America,” which she does with American Aquarium frontman B.J. Barham on the album but handled solo on Saturday.

The performance of “College Town” off that album was particularly poignant coming in the town known as “The City of Colleges,” for its three colleges all within walking distance of the town square in the University of Central Arkansas (my alma mater), Hendrix College and Central Baptist College.

One of my favorite songs off Raised is “The Neon,” which tells of a woman going through a breakup and getting back in the saddle and going out to have some fun. It was one of the highlights of Saturday’s show.

Whitters would perform four songs off The Dream and its deluxe edition, including “Fillin’ My Cup,” which she does on the album with Little Big Town, and “How Far Can It Go?,” which features Trisha Yearwood on the album. Whitters thrilled the crowd by doing some of Yearwood’s 1991 smash “She’s In Love with the Boy,” which was an obvious inspiration for her song.

Whitters’ cover game was absolutely on point on Saturday night with terrific performances of John Mellencamp’s ‘80s heartland classic “Small Town,” John Denver’s legendary “Take Me Home, Country Roads” and Alan Jackson’s 1994 No. 1 hit “Gone Country.” There was no doubt Whitters has great taste in her country and country-adjacent heroes.

Whitters ended the show with her biggest hit thus far, her first Billboard country music charter “Everything She Ain’t,” which peaked at No. 22 on the Country Airplay chart last year and apparently was helped out by a massive trend or following on TikTok. It’s the song that might have Whitters on a trajectory from critically-acclaimed singer-songwriter to a mainstream hitmaker. She’d be having hit after hit in country music if this were the ‘90s or early ‘00s, but we all know how much of a struggle mainstream country can and has been for women, even the absolute best of them over the last decade-plus.

Whitters is the real deal and I hope she finds major success within the country genre. I’ll be keeping up with her future output either way. 

by Julian Spivey
The Sunday (April 30) evening lineup of the final day of the 2023 Stagecoach Festival in Indio, Calif. was absolute fire with Turnpike Troubadours, Tyler Childers, Brooks & Dunn and Chris Stapleton.

The Turnpike Troubadours took the Palomino Stage by storm early in the evening with a 45-minute set featuring many of their fan favorites and the concert debut of one of their new songs.

The Oklahoma red dirt country band began their set with “Before the Devil Knows We’re Dead,” from 2012’s Goodbye Normal Street, a true highlight of their shows that Amazon Music, unfortunately, missed the first half or so on its stream.

The band, which reunited in 2022 after about a half-decade hiatus, performed many of my favorites from their 2010 release Diamonds & Gasoline, like “Every Girl,” “Whole Damn Town,” “Kansas City Southern” and my personal favorite “7 & 7.”

The surprise from Turnpike’s Stagecoach set was the concert debut of a brand new song called “Mean Old Sun,” which hopefully is a sign we’ll be getting a new Turnpike Troubadours album sometime before the end of the year. 

Tyler Childers followed the Turnpike Troubadours at the Palomino Stage on Sunday night with an electric set that really had the audience eating from the palm of his hand.
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The Kentucky native, who’s in the middle of his Send in the Hounds Tour, certainly brought his A-game to Stagecoach and it was great to see as I haven’t yet had the pleasure of attending one of Childers’ shows in person. You could see he was having a great time on stage.

His gospel triple-album Can I Take My Hounds to Heaven? was greatly featured during the set with an amazing performance of the title track, “Old Country Church,” “Way or the Triune God,” “Heart You’ve Been Tendin’” and that album’s version of “Purgatory,” which was done in more of a bluegrass style on the 2017 album that shares its name.

Among my favorite performances of the Childers set were the opening “Whitehouse Road,” which has long been one of my favorites of his, as well as “All Your’n” and “House Fire,” from his 2019 album Country Squire.  

The truly dynamic performance of the set was the final song where he performed “Lady May,” a fan-favorite off Purgatory and you could hear the entire crowd singing it along with him – it wasn’t one of those moments where the artist turns the microphone toward the audience and lets them do it either, they were truly in unison and it made for the most magical moment of any of the Stagecoach performances I caught over the weekend. 

​Brooks & Dunn took the Mane (spelled that way intentionally as in a horse’s mane) Stage as the second to last performance on Sunday night for what amounted to a greatest hits performance from the most legendary duo in the history of country music.
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The set, at least the early part of it, was plagued by sound issues that at one point completely killed the mic for Kix Brooks as he was performing “You’re Gonna Miss Me When I’m Gone,” the duo’s No. 1 hit from 1995. Incredibly B&D performed nine No. 1 hits during their hour-long set including: “My Maria” (1996), “Brand New Man” (1991), “Ain’t Nothing ‘bout You” and “Only in America” (both 2001) and “Play Something Country,” (2005). Though, I would’ve preferred a set without “Play Something Country” and “Put a Girl In It” (2008), which came toward the end of the duo’s recording run when it seemed they were interested in chasing trends of the era to keep themselves relevant.

There were some nice surprises during the B&D set, most notable Brooks doing “Lost and Found,” one of my favorites from the duo, and the 2008 No. 2 hit “Cowgirls Don’t Cry,” with Lainey Wilson (who had performed earlier in the day) coming out to fill in for the Reba McEntire verse.

Unfortunately, Brooks sounded off the entire night. I’m hoping it was more sound issues or him not feeling well than just being what he sounds like these days.

My two favorite performances of the night were “Red Dirt Road,” which despite having been a No. 1 in 2003 I still believe to be one of their most underrated singles, and “Neon Moon,” a No. 1 from 1992 that if you had to choose just one B&D song to last all eternity would be the choice.” The band, of course, also performed their line dance hit “Boot Scootin’ Boogie.” 

Chris Stapleton, the headliner for the festival's final night, did his usual thing of blowing everybody’s minds and hearts away with his singing, songwriting and guitar playing, while not saying a whole lot from the stage. He said it was because he wanted to get more songs in, but really that’s just who he is and we don’t need the chit-chat/banter anyway.

The sound was messing up again for Stapleton’s set opener “Nobody to Blame,” from his Traveller album, but thankfully the crew got it fixed before the next performance.  

Stapleton probably played for around 90 minutes and absolutely blew everybody away with amazing performances from his entire discography. My favorite Stapleton album is still his 2015 debut Traveller from which he performed six tracks, including my absolute favorite “Fire Away,” which he killed as usual. Other tracks from the album included “Parachute,” “Outlaw State of Mind” and “The Devil Named Music,” which included a decent portion of the Lynyrd Skynyrd classic “Free Bird” ahead of it.
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Stapleton’s From A Room albums had, I believe, six songs performed with high energy performances of “Midnight Train to Memphis,” “Millionaire,” “Second One to Know” and “Broken Halos” among them.

His most recent release, 2020’s Starting Over, featured the amazing title track, the smooth vocals of both “Cold” and “You Should Probably Leave,” as well as an absolutely rocking performance of “Arkansas.”

It was hit after hit from Stapleton late Sunday night and the Stagecoach crowd ate it up and when he ended his set perfectly with “Tennessee Whiskey,” the classic cover that put him on the map as a performer nearly a decade ago it was the best possible way to end a festival dedicated to country music.  

The Word Podcast continues its 'My Fantasy Concert Setlist' series featuring frequent contributor Tyler Glover sharing his perfect Taylor Swift setlist for The Eras Tour.