Walking into the Rev Room in Little Rock, Ark., on June 25 was a bit like coming home. When my husband Julian and I saw Jason Boland and the Stragglers perform there in February of 2020, we had no idea that would be our last concert for the next year and four months. For us, live music is a passion. There’s a different energy when you connect on almost a spiritual level with the performer onstage, rocking out to their music in real time. We stay charged up by attending a lot of concerts throughout the year.

So, because of the COVID-19 pandemic, we were in desperate need of a recharge.

The venue looked the same, a black room with concrete floors, just a few steps leading up to another level with a bar in the back. But Mecca is the stage and seeing the instruments set up with the giant red “Rev Room” sign hanging in the back, I couldn’t help but think, “Hello old friend.”

It’s a miracle it survived the pandemic. So many small music venues throughout the country weren’t so lucky. 

It’s a miracle we all survived. It’s what made this concert so different than all the others. There was this excitement, a newness and a gratefulness that was unspoken, but felt so deeply. When opener Gabe Lee took the stage, I immediately teared up. This happened several times. I was grateful to God for the scientists, for healthcare workers, for the vaccine, for my life and for reawakening that piece of my soul that had been silenced since the pandemic started. I leaned over and told my husband, “We’re back” because it was a chance for us to finally breathe, in a crowd, at a concert, without the fear of death looming.

When headliner American Aquarium hit the stage, I was ready to just rock it out. So, when lead singer B.J. Barham opened with “Me + Mine (Lamentations),” a song of struggle and the forgotten middle class, I was taken aback. I quickly realized as my eyes teared up again that there was really no other way to start this set after the trauma of the pandemic. It was perfect. It was an acknowledgement of how far we’ve come and how far we still have to go.

I sang loudly. I laughed. I danced. My husband and I looked at each other singing “Don’t want a day that doesn’t start with you.” I didn’t look at my phone to check the time. I didn’t take a fraction of the photos I normally take at concerts. I was immersed in the moment. I was finally living again.

I knew I missed live music, but I didn’t realize how much I had missed it until that moment. We talked with B.J. after the show – we met him previously, one of the nicest musicians we’ve had the pleasure of chatting with. I got to share with him how much his songs “The World is on Fire” and “A Better South” helped me cope through the craziness of the Trump presidency and countless examples of racial injustice. He explained how happy he was that people of our generation will hopefully bring about a new dawn of tolerance and love, especially in the South. The show itself was such a ray of hope, only the band’s fourth one so far on this comeback tour.

With every note played, every lyric sang and every cheer shouted, we were for the first time bonded by something more than our story of survival. We were bonded by the music. 

It felt so damn good to be back at The Revolution Room in Little Rock, Ark. for the first time in nearly a year-and-a-half for my first concert since the world was put on pause in early 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. For someone who usually attends 10-plus concerts a year going more than a calendar year without live music truly left at hole in my life.
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The Rev Room is my favorite venue in my home state of Arkansas. It’s a place where I’ve seen some of my favorite bands ever, been introduced to some great ones I didn’t previously know about and where I’ve spent many a terrific memory with my wife Aprille.

Not only was Friday, June 25 my first concert back in over a year, but it was re-opening night at The Rev Room, and you could tell it was an important night for everyone in attendance.

I was thrilled when I found out American Aquarium would be re-opening The Rev Room. My first time seeing the band was in May of 2018 at the same venue when they were about to release their album Things Change, which had already released the singles “Tough Folks” and “The World is on Fire,” which I absolutely loved. I wasn’t too familiar with the band prior to that, except for having heard and liked their song “Losing Side of Twenty-Five” off their 2015 release Wolves. I would leave The Rev Room that night a huge fan.

Last year the band released Lamentations, which was probably my favorite country/Americana release of the year, and included “A Better South,” the No. 1 song on this website’s annual 100 Best Americana and Country Songs of the Year list for 2020. It was a brilliant album, but with the pandemic the band didn’t have a chance to tour behind it until now. Their stop in Little Rock on Friday night was their fourth of the week and the tour.

American Aquarium, out of Raleigh, N.C. and fronted by vocalist/songwriter B.J. Barham, is one of the greatest live bands I’ve ever seen as they pour out every bit of energy they have on the stage. You can tell performing live music is what Barham lives for and it’s unbelievable the kind of intensity he can keep up on the stage for an entire set.

The band kicked off their headliner set at The Rev Room on Friday night with the title track from their 2020 album, “Me + Mine (Lamentations),” which was maybe an unusual opener for many shows as it’s slow and about life’s struggles, but it was absolutely the right choice and set the right tone for a first show back from a global pandemic where small independent music clubs like The Rev Room were lucky to survive.

The rest of the night was a fine mixture between veteran songs from the group’s back catalogue and tracks from Lamentations – both of which many of the fans in attendance knew all the words to.

It was somewhat surprising that the only performance from 2018’s Things Change was “The World is on Fire,” which was my favorite track from that album, and I was thrilled to hear it a second time live. “The World is on Fire” was this website’s No. 2 song of 2018.

The band performed the majority of Lamentations on Friday night with my absolute favorite performance being “A Better South,” of course. I feel like “A Better South” is such an important song with a terrific message about how us Southerners (us as in me as a reviewer/listener and Barham as the songwriter/performer) can be proud of where we come from, but also ready to rid the South of all the bullshit that past generations want to hold on to as their heritage.

There honestly isn’t a weak track off Lamentations, which made all the performances from the album highlights of the evening, including “The Long Haul,” “The Luckier You Get,” “Starts With You” and “Before the Dogwood Blooms,” which is still stuck in my head more than 48 hours later.

Little Rock is an important stop on every American Aquarium tour for Barham as he stated from the stage on Friday night as it was truly the first city outside of his home state of North Carolina to give the band a chance more than a decade ago, particularly the White Water Tavern (another local venue which hopefully will re-open soon). In fact, Barham has written songs inspired by White Water Tavern like “Rattlesnake,” which he performed Friday night. You could tell from the response the crowd gave the band that many of those in attendance had been following A.A. around quite a while.

Some of the “classic” American Aquarium tracks beloved by those in attendance on Friday night included “Casualties,” “Wichita Falls,” “Wolves,” “Katherine Belle” and, of course, the incredible one-two punch of “I Hope He Breaks Your Heart” and “Burn.Flicker.Die,” which seems to end the set of so many American Aquarium shows.

The group would return for an encore that included a fun cover of one of my favorite ‘90s country songs “Some Girls Do” by Sawyer Brown, that the group featured on its most recent release Slappers, Bangers & Certified Twangers, Vol. 1, a ‘90s country cover album of some of their favorite songs of that era that they recorded just to have a bit of fun while they couldn’t tour.

Nashville’s Gabe Lee, who has released two really strong albums in the last couple of years – 2019’s farmland and last year’s Honky Tonk Hell – opened the show on Friday night and sounded absolutely terrific. He opened his probably 45-minute set with “Ol Smokey” off farmland, one of the highlights of his repertoire. Other great performances from his set included the title track of his most recent release and “Emmylou,” which he set his guitar aside for in favor of a keyboard and just dropped the jaws of those listening.

This was truly a perfect night to get reacquainted with my love of live music and I can’t wait for my next show.