CONCERT PREVIEW
Blackberry Smoke
With Drake White and the Big Fire and Brother Hawk. 8 p.m. Nov. 28. $27.50. The Tabernacle, 152 Luckie St., Atlanta. 1-800-745-3000, www.livenation.com.
When Blackberry Smoke performs in Atlanta, it feels different, the band jokes, because they hardly ever play their hometown.
They aren’t exaggerating.
The quintet’s 2015 tour behind their upcoming fourth studio album, “Holding All the Roses,” will crisscross the country for four months, with zero mention of a local date.
All the more reason to catch the Southern-rock-blues-country wizards when they perform at the Tabernacle on Friday.
That, and the promise from singer-guitarist Charlie Starr that there will be some “special guests” making an appearance.
"It might be a long show, so people better get a babysitter," he said earlier this month while sitting with his bandmates on their tour bus before the Lynyrd Skynyrd tribute concert at the Fox Theatre.
Last year’s visit to the Tabernacle also brought a surprise of a nonmusical sort — the presentation of a check for $30,000 to Aflac Cancer Center of Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta. The money was raised from the VIP meet and greets the band held during their 2013 tour; they plan to present the organization with another donation this year.
Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta grasps an important part of drummer Brit Turner’s heart — his 8-year-old daughter, Lana, was treated at the center in 2009, when she was diagnosed with stage 4 neuroblastoma.
“They were amazing to her,” Turner said.
Lana was in the audience at the Lynyrd Skynyrd show and happily bounced on her seat when her dad and the guys hit the stage to perform a gut-punching rendition of “Workin’ for MCA.”
Turner, Starr and the rest of the band — Paul Jackson on guitar, Brandon Still on keyboards and Turner’s brother Richard on bass — will have a few weeks of downtime with their families over the holidays. But the Feb. 10 release date for “Roses” means a run-up of promotion and pre-tour prep early in the year.
The new album will be released on Rounder Records, a change for the band since they recorded their last, “The Whippoorwill,” on Zac Brown’s Southern Ground label.
Starr said parting with Brown was amicable and that both bands had “great times” together.
“Things don’t always work out, but friendship transcends stuff like that,” Starr said. “Zac was restructuring his label at some point and we already had plans to make a new album and Rounder asked us and we said yes. At that point, we weren’t going to be able to make any progress on Southern Ground. But God bless Zac; he tried with everyone.”
On the new album, Blackberry Smoke worked with celebrated producer Brendan O’Brien, whose work the band admired on releases by musical soul mates the Black Crowes.
“Not to mention Pearl Jam, Stone Temple Pilots, Springsteen and Aerosmith,” Starr said with a smile.
O’Brien, an Atlanta native now back living in Los Angeles, returned to his hometown (well, Kennesaw) to record most of the album with Blackberry Smoke at the Quarry, the studio established in 2009 by local-based Christian rockers Third Day. Jackson and Starr then zipped west to L.A. to finish some guitar and vocal recordings.
“The way the records he makes sounds, it’s what we love. He’s sympathetic to our kind of music and that’s what he brought,” Starr said of O’Brien’s touch.
The band describes the new, 12-song record as “meat and potatoes rock ‘n’ roll” and that’s something Brit Turner can readily support.
“Sometimes we’ve had ideas for recording that in the past, we haven’t had the time or maybe the producer to flesh it out. This record I feel like we got to do some of those sounds we were thinking in our heads and Brendan was the one to help us achieve that,” he said. “I listen to it, and I’m proud of it.”
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