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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<\/a>, who sold out Hollywood Casino Amphitheater<\/a> Thursday night in St. Louis for the second time in four years.<\/p>\n Childers was already big in Americana\/alt-country circles before that: His breakthrough album Purgatory<\/em> came out in 2017, Country Squire<\/em> in 2019, and songs such as \u201cFeathered Indians,\u201d \u201cLady May,\u201d and \u201cAll Your\u2019n\u201d already had a strong fanbase. But once those songs, plus \u201cShake the Frost\u201d and later \u201cIn Your Love,\u201d started circulating heavily on TikTok and Reels, Childers started, in his parlance, eatin\u2019 big time, graduating from clubs (like a packed show at The Pageant in 2018, played while a blizzard roared outside) to amphitheaters like Thursday\u2019s 18,000-seat Hollywood Casino and even to stadiums: Childers plays Chicago\u2019s Wrigley Field this weekend.\u00a0<\/p>\n Subscribe to the St. Louis Music newsletter to discover upcoming concerts, local artists to watch, and more across an eclectic playlist of genres.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n We will never send spam or annoying emails. Unsubscribe anytime.<\/p>\n Thursday\u2019s concert was attended by a mix of fans old and young, some old-school alt-country dudes who\u2019ve been swearing by Tyler since \u201cWhitehouse Road\u201d 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 \u201cLady May\u201d turned up on Yellowstone<\/em>. 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\u2019t mere pretenders\u2014they knew all the words.\u00a0<\/p>\n What\u2019s 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\u2014the trucker hats, the cutoffs, the bandanas, the pearl-snap shirts, the boots, the cowboy hats, the barber shop mullets\u2014Tyler 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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\u2014he defaults his gaze off to his right\u2014and seemed downright bored with some of his older material like \u201cWhitehouse Road\u201d and \u201cHonky Tonk Flame.\u201d The longneck-drinking days are gone, too; Tyler sipped water from a mason jar all night, sometimes mid-song.\u00a0<\/p>\n He was looser without the guitar, as on the opening \u201cEatin\u2019 Big Time,\u201d 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 \u201cJersey Giant\u201d as \u201coff of TikTok,\u201d a reference to the non-album track\u2019s journey through live clips, fan recordings, covers, and eventually the social-media bloodstream.<\/p>\n Childers\u2019 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 \u201cDown Under\u201d and the country-waltz \u201cOneida,\u201d complete with fiddle and tremolo-drenched accordion (and a disco ball). \u201cDirty Ought Trill\u201d 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cTirtha Yatra\u201d pushed things into stranger, more exploratory territory, showing how comfortable Childers has become with stretching country music into spiritual, jammy, psychedelic space. That balance\u2014country songcraft on one side, road-band looseness on the other\u2014helped keep the show compelling despite Childers\u2019 own mostly stoic delivery.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cBorn Again\u201d and the Alex Harvey cover \u201cTulsa Turnaround\u201d were other early peaks, but the show\u2019s emotional center came when Childers walked through the crowd to a small secondary stage at the back of the seat to face the lawn. \u201cLady May\u201d was played solo acoustic, and the crowd sang it like a wedding vow. \u201cNose on the Grindstone\u201d followed, expanded to an acoustic trio, and \u201cFollow You to Virgie\u201d sounded excellent, with Tyler in full vocal squawk.\u00a0<\/p>\nGet a guide to the region\u2019s booming music scene<\/h4>\n