Jason Aldean, Country's Biggest Rock Star, Takes On Fenway Park This Weekend
(CBS) - It's not any artist who can sell out venues as large as Fenway Park, New York's Madison Square Garden, and Chicago's Wrigley Field. But then again, Jason Aldean is not just any artist. He's a bona fide country superstar.
Aldean takes the stage at Fenway on Friday and Saturday night, six weeks after performing at the Boston Strong concert at the TD Garden in May.
Our colleagues at Radio.com spoke with Aldean recently about his his career, his latest album Night Train, and his 2013 tour, which includes dates at Fenway and Wrigley (July 20).
The two historic baseball stadiums can pack in upwards of 37,000 and 41,000 people, respectively. Couple those figures with the fact that earlier this year he also sold out Madison Square Garden (over 18,000) and played the first-ever music show at Atlanta's Sanford Stadium (to a crowd of more than 60,000), and it's clear that Jason Aldean has reached a new level of popularity. As music journalist Alan Light says in our Radio.com Essentials profile on Jason, he "blew through being an arena headliner" and this year aimed much higher.
And he is, if ticket sales at these massive venues are any indication, succeeding. As Drew Walker of Chicago country station US99.5 says, 2013 "has been his coming out year."
Since the early days of his career (his debut album was released in 2005), Aldean has worked hard to create a concert experience that every year is bigger and better for his core crowd -- and in the process also attracts new fans. "Your live shows are just like anything else," Aldean tells Radio.com. "The more you're out there on the road, playing your shows, you see stuff, every year, that you get more ideas about. And each year you try to change it up" so that "people don't think they're coming to see the same show every single year."
His popularity can in part be attributed to his ability to choose the right songs. "When you're putting albums together," Aldean explains, "the songs will reflect whatever place you are at that particular time." And in the case of his latest collection, Night Train, when it came time to put together material for that album, he was coming off the biggest success of his career to date (his 2011 album My Kinda Party). "So that was where my mindset was when we started recording this record."
Related: The First Time Aldean Heard "Hicktown" On The Radio
"He doesn't write any of his own stuff," notes country journalist Beville Dunkerley, "but he has the knack for picking the songs that sound like something he could have written himself." And on Night Train, he's again reaching a high degree of success with his picks.
