CONCERT PREVIEW
Zac Brown Band. 7 p.m. June 7. $33.75-$79.25. Aaron's Amphitheatre at Lakewood, 2002 Lakewood Way, Atlanta. 404-443-5090, www.livenation.com.
Matt Mangano is having a good time playing with the Zac Brown Band. But the group’s new bassist insists he’s playing far more than country music, the genre most often associated with the group.
“I kind of put Zac’s music out of the genre of country and into the genre of good,” Mangano said in a phone interview. “We go from a country song to a hard-rocking song to a reggae-ish song to a bluegrassy song. It’s fun. And it’s fun to see people respond. They’re singing with every song, dancing around. If it makes you dance and makes you happy at the end of the night, it’s done its job.”
Mangano only joined the band in December and its just-started Great American Road Trip Tour is his first with them. But he has known and worked with Brown for years.
A Georgia native, Mangano attended Berklee College of Music in Boston, where his roommate was an aspiring blues-rock guitarist named John Mayer. He played rhythm guitar in an early incarnation of Mayer’s band. When that group wasn’t on the road, he found gigs back in his home state.
That’s when Mangano met and initially played with Brown. After about a year, Mangano moved to Nashville to work in audio engineering. A few years later, Mangano and Brown reconnected. Mangano began mixing the Zac Brown Band albums and became director of Brown’s Southern Ground Studio.
Surprisingly, Mangano didn’t immediately say yes when Brown asked him to join the band.
“You would think that it would be an easy decision, a no-brainer,” Mangano said. “At that time, I was the studio director. … I wasn’t touring. I was home every day. I could wake up and see my son every day. It would be hard to have that on the road, I thought. But I found out, I get to see my family more now. When you’re working in the studio, you have some very long days. Now, I get to see them three days a week.”
With Mangano on board, the Zac Brown Band has become an eight-piece outfit, with John Driskell Hopkins, who had played bass, becoming a multi-instrumentalist, playing guitar, baritone guitar, ukulele, upright bass and banjo as well as continuing to sing.
Mangano said he fit in easily with the group. “I played with Zac in the early configuration of the band. It wasn’t called the Zac Brown Band then. But we were playing some of the songs we’re playing now.”
He’s getting comfortable in a new environment — the arenas, amphitheaters and giant festival stages where the band plays in front of 10,000 or more people a night.
“We’ll usually play a couple hours,” Mangano said. “We’re going to take you on a ride. It’ll be a wild ride, you just hang on. There will be new material, old material and some new cover songs. I’m not going to tell you what they are. But I will tell you there’s no ‘Stairway to Heaven.’”
Asked if he had any favorite songs, Mangano pointed to a pair of tunes.
“I love the ballads, actually. Playing a ballad like ‘Highway 20’ or ‘Free,’ the bass part isn’t very hard. I play a lot of whole notes and I can listen to the lyrics and get lost in them. They have an impact every night.”
If the ballads are his favorites, what is the hardest song to play?
“I’d say ‘Let It Rain’ from ‘The Grohl Sessions,’” Mangano said, mentioning the recently released EP the group recorded with Foo Fighters frontman and former Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl. “It’s technically involved and there’s a lot of notes in that. We’re all on the edge of our seats when we’re playing that one. It’s like water skiing behind a fast boat.”
But even the hard ones are fun to play, Mangano said. “I’m really enjoying this. I fit in right away and it’s only getting better. I’m in a great band.”
A great band that plays more than country music.
