Blackberry Smoke: Be Right Here Tour
Friday, November 15 at 8:00 PM EST
When Charlie Starr started writing the songs that would become Blackberry Smoke’s new album, Be Right Here, the first tune the vocalist/lead guitarist worked up was “Dig A Hole.” Formed by an old guitar riff married with a Wurlitzer chorus riff written by keyboardist Brandon Still, the swampy psychedelic-rock song is a powerful statement about choosing your path in life—whether you want to give into temptation or walk a more righteous road.
“In life, we all are faced with choices,” Starr says. “Are we going to do good, or are we going to do bad? Are we going to love, or are we going to hate? We have a finite amount of time, each of us on this Earth. So probably want to make the best out of it instead of wasting time.”
“Dig A Hole” is the lead track on Be Right Here and sets the tone for another expansive set of rock ‘n’ roll from Blackberry Smoke. As always, the Georgia-based band—Starr, Still, guitarist/vocalist Paul Jackson, bassist/vocalist Richard Turner and drummer Brit Turner—draw inspiration from Southern rock, blues-leaning classic rock and rootsy vintage country. But on Be Right Here, Blackberry Smoke sound even more self-assured, from the strength of their songwriting to their musical execution.
Over the past two decades, Blackberry Smoke has developed this confidence and amassed a loyal fanbase, leading their last five full-length albums to achieve great chart success, including 2021’s You Hear Georgia, which reached #1 on Billboard’s Americana/Folk Albums chart.
The band wrote and recorded You Hear Georgia during the most intense periods of the pandemic but held off on releasing it until they could go tour again. Starr says Blackberry Smoke took the same deliberate approach with Be Right Here, which was recorded in late 2022 and early 2023, around the same time drummer Brit Turner was diagnosed with a type of brain tumor known as Glioblastoma. “We didn’t feel a whole lot of pressure to go in and make this one quickly,” Starr shares.
Working once again with Grammy-Award winning producer Dave Cobb, Blackberry Smoke has crafted music that’s raw and immediate-sounding. They tracked the album live in the same space; an approach Cobb also prefers as it lends itself to a looser vibe. “I remember different times I would say, ‘I think we should redo that,’ and he’s like, ‘No, leave it that way. That way it’s magical,” Starr remembers. “It’s just as natural and real as possible.”
Location also factored into Be Right Here’s sound as they recorded most of the album at Nashville’s beloved RCA Studio A, and then polished it off in Cobb’s studio in Savannah, Georgia. “It’s down in the low country and beautiful,” Starr says of the space, called Georgia Mae. “This album has a swagger to it, a deep in the pocket kind of feel. Those surroundings helped give the record that feel.”
Be Right Here’s lyrics are particularly literary, full of vivid and relatable characters that ensure the songs often resemble rich short stories. For example, “Whatcha Know Good,” a co-write with Brent Cobb, is a “feel-good song” driven by an amiable narrator who gets along with everybody and dislikes negativity. “There’s plenty of bad news when you turn on the television,” Starr says. “The dude in this song, he doesn’t want to hear it anymore. He wants to go to fishing and talk about good news. We were giggling the whole time because we know that guy. Maybe we are that guy.”
A laid-back, Stones-like guitar lick from former Buckcherry guitarist Keith Nelson inspired “Like It Was Yesterday,” helping Starr conjure another very specific character: an earnest young guy who doesn’t have much life experience, but knows what he likes and is grateful for good times. “I picture him laying on the hood of his car with his girl, staring up at the moon and the stars,” Starr says. “It’s the idea of holding onto that fleeting moment, because it can slip away from you.”
Other Be Right Here highlights include “Azalea” and “Little Bit Crazy,” both co-written with Starr’s frequent songwriting collaborator Travis Meadows. The latter song, which begins with a chorus of soulful gospel singers before blooming into a languid Southern rocker, features a narrator who’s embroiled in a relationship that’s fun, but not necessarily healthy.
Meanwhile, the lovely, elegiac folk ballad “Azalea” is centered on someone who seems emotionally bereft and spiritually lost, but is working hard to find their way home. “It’s a heavy song. It’s not a happy song, per se,” Starr says. However, “Azalea” has a distinct streak of optimism near the end, which Starr says is intentional: “There’s some hope in there, too. It comes with both Travis and I being fathers. Hold on to your kids as tight as you can without smothering them.”
The delicate balance of familial protection also permeates the easygoing “Other Side of the Light,” a co-write with Levi Lowrey. Written from the perspective of a young boy on an obstacle-filled road trip, the tune stresses that he’ll find shelter and safety with his mom. In contrast, the stomping “Hammer and the Nail,” which Starr wrote with Nelson, takes another approach to family ties—in this case, a son who needs to decide if he’s going to give into his wild side and take after his rebellious father. Fittingly, lively acoustic guitar gives way to an explosive chorus with freewheeling bar-blues piano and raucous electric riffs.
Be Right Here ends on a confident note, the organ-driven power ballad, “Barefoot Angel.” Starr says he doesn’t write many love songs, but made an exception here. “It’s either me singing about my wife or some guy singing about his wife that’s in the same situation, which is, I wouldn’t be able to do anything without her. When I’m worried and feeling bad, she makes it better.”
For Blackberry Smoke, embracing the light and finding the silver lining are once again at the heart of what they do best.
Opening Act: Sam Morrow
Five albums into an acclaimed career, Sam Morrow has carved out a sound that exists somewhere outside of genre and geography. It’s his own version of modern-day American roots music: a mix of roadhouse rock & roll, bluesy R&B, and country-fried funky-tonk, driven forward by groove, grease, and guitars.
It’s also a sound that owes as much to the road — where Morrow spent most of the past decade on tour, supporting albums like Concrete & Mud and Gettin’ By On Gettin’ Down — as the various places he’s called home. This is music for the fast lane. Music for empty highways. Music for people who, like Morrow, always seem to find themselves in transit.
“I feel like I’m searching for something,” he says. “I’ve been on some kind of journey. Maybe I don’t know what I’m looking for, exactly, but I’m keeping my eyes open.”
On The Ride Here marks the latest leg of that journey. Morrow takes us along for the ride, singing in a laidback Texas drawl about highway haunts (“Thunderbird Motel”), peyote trips in the Mojave Desert (“Searching For Paradise”), and the glamor and grind of the open road (“Hired Gun”). On The Ride Here offers more than roadside ephemera and travelogue tales, though. Morrow isn’t just focused on the drive these days; he’s interested in the destination, too, and a number of these songs deal with the hard lessons and new perspectives that come with rest, reflection, and time spent at home.
Morrow’s first home was in Houston, Texas, where he grew up developing not only an appreciation for punk, hip-hop, and ZZ Top, but also an appetite for the vices that would land him in rehab while still a teenager. He eventually found sobriety in Los Angeles and chose to stay there, trading his Texas roots for the California coast. Living far away from his birthplace gave Morrow a new appreciation for the country music he’d once ignored as a Texan. He began filtering those country sounds into his own music, mashing them together with the southern boogie of Little Feat, the electric blues of Freddie King, the Tex-Mex of Los Lobos, and the desert rock of Queens Of The Stone Age. Separately, those influences might have sounded like strange bedfellows. Together, though, they formed the bedrock of Sam Morrow’s rootsy rock & roll.
Championed by outlets like NPR and Rolling Stone, Morrow’s first four albums turned him into one of the West Coast’s biggest Americana exports. The appeal wasn’t just the swaggering, swampy music itself; it was also the sharp storytelling and unfiltered insights of a songwriter who wasn’t afraid to shine a light on the skeletons in his closet. Balancing honesty with self-deprecating humor, Morrow became a working-class hero for those struggling to follow the straight and narrow. On The Ride Here finds him in that same position. He measures the distance between the sins of his youth and the challenges of his present with “Medicine Man,” a stomping, riff-driven rocker with a slide guitar solo worthy of Joe Walsh. “Searching For Paradise” finds him in Hunter S. Thompson mode, recounting a hallucinogenic trip in the California desert over a backdrop of greasy, East L.A. country-funk. The loose, laidback “On My Way” finds him asking a lover for patience, promising her that his best days are ahead. A similar message anchors “Straight and Narrow,” which trades the fiery fretwork of the
album’s louder moments — played by Morrow and guest guitarist Eli Wulfmeier — for the cooling calm of Hammond B3 organ. “I was tripped by sin; I walked the line and I fell halfway in,” Morrow sings before laying out his credentials as a changed man, promising that “I’m a new man with a new suit.”
On The Ride Here was produced in Southern California by longtime collaborator Eric Corne, with an all-star roster of West Coast musicians — including bassist Ted Russell Kamp, keyboardist Sasha Smith, and drummers Matt Tecu and Butch Norton — adding primal punch and roughhewn polish to the 11 songs. Morrow rewrote several tunes after the initial tracking sessions were complete, looking to deliver the tightest, tautest album of his career. The result is a forward-thinking record that encapsulates his sound better than any album before it, serving as the final piece of a musical trilogy that began with the country-inspired Concrete & Mud and the rock-influenced Gettin’ By On Gettin’ Down.
“When I was first getting sober, somebody told me that I need to wake up early in the morning and tell myself I don’t know shit, because that’s the only way I’m gonna learn something new that day,” Morrow says. “I think it’s a simplified way of just taking your ego out of the situation. I still do that to this day. I try to remain mindful and present. I try to learn something I didn’t know before. And with this album, I think I’ve learned what my sound is. I’ve learned to truly sound like myself.”
Enjoy all of our upcoming performances on our new Byrider Stage!
