One of the more surprising cultural shifts in the musical world took place in about 2022 when legions of 18-to-24 year olds suddenly started screaming every word to songs by Americana singer-songwriters to whom these kids would have theretofore paid no attention at all. That Swiftie-style allegiance got a big boost when these young listeners discovered Zach Bryan, a gateway drug to other rootsy troubadours like Noah Kahan, who now plays stadiums, and Tyler Childers, who sold out Hollywood Casino Amphitheater Thursday night in St. Louis for the second time in four years.
Childers was already big in Americana/alt-country circles before that: His breakthrough album Purgatory came out in 2017, Country Squire in 2019, and songs such as “Feathered Indians,” “Lady May,” and “All Your’n” already had a strong fanbase. But once those songs, plus “Shake the Frost” and later “In Your Love,” started circulating heavily on TikTok and Reels, Childers started, in his parlance, eatin’ big time, graduating from clubs (like a packed show at The Pageant in 2018, played while a blizzard roared outside) to amphitheaters like Thursday’s 18,000-seat Hollywood Casino and even to stadiums: Childers plays Chicago’s Wrigley Field this weekend.
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Thursday’s concert was attended by a mix of fans old and young, some old-school alt-country dudes who’ve been swearing by Tyler since “Whitehouse Road” first turned their heads as a savior of gravel-road Southern-twang and a revivalist of druggy outlaw country brimming with Willie whine and Waylon thump. But the vast majority in attendance were the TikTok kids and younger fans who discovered Childers when “Lady May” turned up on Yellowstone. Many of the latter group were girls in sundresses and cowboy boots who spent the pre-show and opening-act hours posing on the lawn for their Insta-shots; once Tyler hit the stage just before 9 p.m., these girls proved, however, they weren’t mere pretenders—they knew all the words.
What’s further confounding is how little Childers appears to pander to any of his audiences. Not only has he become an arena-sized country artist without kissing a square inch of Nashville butt, he has attracted an ocean of Gen-Zers without making any apparent effort to appeal to them, either sartorially or sonically. While the fans certainly partook in Americana cosplay—the trucker hats, the cutoffs, the bandanas, the pearl-snap shirts, the boots, the cowboy hats, the barber shop mullets—Tyler showed up with an almost comic indifference to amphitheater stardom, wearing a drab green cardigan over a impressively unflattering blotch-camo shirt with olive pants, looking part duck-blind denizen, part rural substitute teacher.
He also made no rock-star moves; Tyler tends to stand stock-still while singing with his guitar, casting a feral stare into the crowd—he defaults his gaze off to his right—and seemed downright bored with some of his older material like “Whitehouse Road” and “Honky Tonk Flame.” The longneck-drinking days are gone, too; Tyler sipped water from a mason jar all night, sometimes mid-song.
He was looser without the guitar, as on the opening “Eatin’ Big Time,” a fitting choice as the song is one of his funniest and most self-aware, sung like a guy suspicious of the whole operation. In fact, early on, he nodded to his unlikely viral surge, introducing “Jersey Giant” as “off of TikTok,” a reference to the non-album track’s journey through live clips, fan recordings, covers, and eventually the social-media bloodstream.
Childers’ band, the Food Stamps, has expanded to seven pieces, making room for two keyboardists, E Street Band-style, as well as two guitarists and a pedal steel, which made for an expansive, swirling sound on songs like “Down Under” and the country-waltz “Oneida,” complete with fiddle and tremolo-drenched accordion (and a disco ball). “Dirty Ought Trill” was a major highlight, the grooviest dance song of the night with in-the-round vocals and outlaw-funk organ and guitars all over the place.
“Tirtha Yatra” pushed things into stranger, more exploratory territory, showing how comfortable Childers has become with stretching country music into spiritual, jammy, psychedelic space. That balance—country songcraft on one side, road-band looseness on the other—helped keep the show compelling despite Childers’ own mostly stoic delivery.
“Born Again” and the Alex Harvey cover “Tulsa Turnaround” were other early peaks, but the show’s emotional center came when Childers walked through the crowd to a small secondary stage at the back of the seat to face the lawn. “Lady May” was played solo acoustic, and the crowd sang it like a wedding vow. “Nose on the Grindstone” followed, expanded to an acoustic trio, and “Follow You to Virgie” sounded excellent, with Tyler in full vocal squawk.
Back on the main stage, Tyler launched into a lengthy, awkward ramble about the negative emotions that come from hating people led to “Bitin’ List” (and some crowd-participatory dog barking), followed by band introductions, which were likewise long-winded, homespun mini-bios—not built for TikTok attention spans—but Tyler clearly wanted the crowd to understand that these are not anonymous players but the engine of the show. Indeed, hairball steel player James Barker, guitarist/fiddler Jesse Wells (not Welles, that’s a different guy), and acoustic flatpicker CJ Cain were terrific all night. (Why both Barker and Cain wore NL-Central-rival Cincinnati Reds merch on stage in St. Louis is anybody’s guess.)
The final third of the show was the payoff, with a faithful version of “Whitehouse Road,” still one of his best songs, and a take on “Honky Tonk Flame” that spread out into noisy psychedelia defined by a squealing fiddle and pedal steel melee. Tyler then delivered a spoken plea for fellowship, a contrast to his earlier Bitin’ List misanthropy, encouraging folks to introduce themselves to the strangers around them, like Sunday-morning church. That brought on “Way of the Triune God” in that ecstatic gospel feel that has become a part of Tyler’s live identity—the sound of communal music: voices rising, instruments circling, the crowd pulled into a tent-revival rhythm.
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“Snipe Hunt” (with Tyler seated and, later, lying flat on his back) and “House Fire” pushed the set back toward full-band release. “House Fire,” in particular, remains one of his best live songs, incendiary in lyric and aural charge, complete with infernal imagery on the video wall behind him, a changeable, often trippy backdrop all night that complemented Tyler’s now-customary living-room stage motif of old-fashioned TVs and table lamps.
He closed with “Universal Sound” and the Southern-rock rave-up “Heart You’ve Been Tendin’,” one of the songs that best explains Childers’ appeal: rocking, searching, cosmic, but still grounded in the sound of Kentucky country, ending the night with a reminder that Childers’ lyrically graceful songs are often about work, faith, love, damage, and recovery.
The show was not perfect, and some newer material may have tested fans who came mainly for the older singalongs. But those are also the things that made the night feel alive from an artist who is not trying to be the smoothest operator in country music. Instead, he delivers old songs, new songs, gospel, bluegrass, honky-tonk, mountain music, and weird spiritual detours onto the same stage to see what catches fire. In St. Louis, plenty did.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.stlmag.com ’
