Portland, ME (February 6, 2017) – Leave it to Brantley Gilbert to start the year off with a massive 1, 2 Knock-Out. First his album THE DEVIL DON’T SLEEP (The Valory Music Co.) lands at No. 1 on the Country Albums and Top 200 Albums chart, as his first album in three years outsells any album in America. Then his THE DEVIL DON’T SLEEP 2017 arena tour kicked off in the nation’s Rust Belt with three sold out shows in Reading, PA, College Station, PA and Portland, Maine.
“I have always been about taking the music to the people,” Gilbert says. “Having a new album, it’s not quite complete until we take the new songs to the BG Nation. We’ve been playing some of them over the last summer, but now they’ve got the music – and they come out fully loaded to rock those songs with us. And I gotta say, this weekend, they sounded great on the songs from The Devil Don’t Sleep, which makes us feel like we really hit it with the album!”
Quietly selling back-to-back platinum albums with HALFWAY TO HEAVEN and JUST AS I AM, Jefferson, Georgia’s Brantley Gilbert has become a different kind of heavy metal force to be reckoned with: a songwriter committed to tapping into the gut of the outlier, the roughneck, the down-home and the downtrodden by rocking his country hard and writing songs torn straight from their lives. And as a word-of-mouth favorite, he’s able to tour the working class communities of the Rust Belt, the Heartland and the Southeast, connecting with those music lovers who don’t really care what you call it, just that you bring it every time.
The Reading Eagle wrote of opening night, “far from an outlier; Gilbert stuck his microphone out for audience participation in nearly every song, and they were happy to oblige. This wasn’t music for thinking, it was music for escaping” and industry touring trade Pollstar echoed of opening night, “most notably on a brief instrumental honky tonk interlude that allowed the five musicians backing Gilbert to show off their chops, the music was heavily country. But for much of the rest of the show, it was an amalgam of styles Gilbert grew up listening to, incorporating crunchy guitars, drum machines, even some rapped verses.”
“People want to rock, they want to party, but they want the songs to be about their lives, and all I’ve ever done is write my life and take it on the road,” says the CMA Song of the Year nominee. “I come from the same kind of places our fans do, and there’s a lot of people just like me and my guys out there – and they show up because they know we’re gonna put it down.”
After last winter’s successful BLACK OUT arena tour and the summer’s TAKE IT OUTSIDE tour, climaxing in two sold-out in-advance shows at Colorado’s iconic Red Rocks Amphitheater, Gilbert’s THE DEVIL DON’T SLEEP TOUR solidifies his reputation as one of America’s hardest-hitting country hybids. StateCollege.com opined, “Gilbert appropriately set the tone for the night with his first two songs, ‘It’s About to Get Dirty’ and ‘My Kinda Party,’ on cue to indoor fireworks and flames,” and Penn State’sDaily Collegian offered, “Gilbert made sure the crowd was energized and ready to party.”
Gilbert’s THE DEVIL DON’T SLEEP isn’t slowing down. Look for the renegade songwriter to play Wichita, Kansas on Thursday, February 9; Cape Girardeau, MO on Friday, February 10; and Charleston, WV on Saturday February 11. With a No. 1 album and a tour selling out, there’s plenty of reason to get out and get rowdy. This weekend, look for the hard-working, hard-charging to be hitting those shows.
More information about THE DEVIL DON’T SLEEP TOUR is available at www.brantleygilbert.com.
