Show Reviews

 

NASHVILLE'S MOST WANTED

Ft. Love and Theft, Keith Anderson, CJ Solar, and Dave Fenley

Tuesday August 17, 2021

@ Scoreboard Bar & Grill in Nashville, TN

(Review by: Jeffrey Kurtis)

Nashville is full of pockets of live music that are all flooded with songwriters and artists trying to find their place to fit in and make strides in an overcrowded music scene.

With his ultra-popular weekly show “Nashville’s Most Wanted,” Cody Purvis has hit a mark in a way that is best comparable to what this town saw back in 2001 with John Rich and Big Kenny’s MusikMafia.

The Purvis hosted show has found its niche in the Music Valley area over the past two years, just outside the downtown lights of Broadway and in the shadow of the Grand Ole Opry House, and it welcomes the best emerging artists and songwriters to their stage and fuses them together with some of the top talents of the genre.

Taking over Scoreboard Bar & Grill on this Tuesday night, Purvis welcomed the cream of the country crop with an incredible lineup that featured Dave Fenley, CJ Solar, Keith Anderson, and Love and Theft. 

 

Dave Fenley, a Lufkin, TX native who is recognizable from his stints on America’s Got Talent and season 15 of The Voice, wowed the early arriving 5PM crowd with his blend of country and Southern Rock ideals that can easily be heard running rampant throughout his most current single “Welcome To The South.”

 

CJ Solar, a songwriter/artist who has been making a tremendous name for himself over the past few years, brought his Southern rock tilted edge and country grit to the stage as he used his set to showcase who he is as an original artist and a hit songwriter, while unraveling a few layers of influences with a cover selection that often saw him splicing covers into his own originals.

Solar offered the crowd the full spectrum of his artist catalog with “Coming My Way” (from his latest release of the same name) and “American Girls” and “Airplane” (both from his 2018 EP Get Away With It), while also digging back to his debut EP to grab his first single “Tall Boy” and the rocking “Just Another Day In The Country.”

He gave the crowd, who at this point in his set was already pulled into his performance, a glimpse into his next record with the Lynyrd Skynyrd like feel of “Long Nights,” and revisited a monumental moment in his career when he played “Watered Down Whiskey,” a song which he explained, “the first time that we ever got to play this song live was on the Opry, so it’s a special one for us.”

However, as with any newer act that many people might be hearing for the first time, Solar was not only very smart to inject his set with a few covers including Charlie Daniels “Long Haired Country Boy” and snippets of “Freebird” and “Champagne Supernova,” but to also highlight his songwriting by playing the hits he wrote that everyone would know -  “Some Girls” from Jameson Rodgers, “Blue Bandana” from Jerrod Niemann,” and “Up Down” from Morgan Wallen – the latter which he humbly stated, “This was my first #1 as a songwriter.” 

FULL SET LIST

1) American Girls

2) Tall Boy

3) Long Haired Country Boy (Charlie Daniels cover)

4) Coming My Way

5) She’s So High (Tal Bachman cover)

6) Airplane

7) Just Another Day In The Country

8) Long Nights                                                                           

9) Some Girls

10) Watered Down Whiskey

11) Blue Bandanna – rolled into Oasis “Champagne Supernova”

12) Up Down – pushed into “Freebird”

 

Cody Purvis, host of “Nashville’s Most Wanted,” said it best when he introduced Keith Anderson as someone who really doesn’t need any introduction.

“Most of you already know this guy sitting next to me up here right now,” Purvis began as the audience cheered while Anderson tuned his guitar. “I am honored to welcome Mr. Keith Anderson to the stage.”

Whereas CJ Solar had cranked up the electric to bring a boot stomping feel to the stage, Keith Anderson brought more of a songwriter showcase feel – armed with only an acoustic guitar, incredible songs, and some of the stories behind them.

“How many small-town people do we have in here tonight?” Anderson asked, as he then took us on a picturesque journey of his hometown of Miami, OK; first by describing the small-town with his words, then by opening his set with “Podunk.”

He rolled through his 7-song set, playing all of the biggest hits from his catalog including “XXL,” I Still Miss You,” “Every Time I Hear Your Name,” and the set closer “Pickin’ Wildflowers,” which had everyone singing along with it as he often backed away from the microphone to let the crowd shout back the chorus at him.

Anderson spoke of his earliest days in town as a songwriter and how he had nothing much to his name until a song he was lucky enough to have co-written changed his entire life before he played “Beer Run,” the popular song from Garth Brooks Scarecrow album, which featured the legendary George Jones. 

Encouraging those in the audience to stick with it and continue chasing after their dreams, Anderson told:

“This next song sat on the shelf for about 10 years. It’s a wedding song that ironically was written by 3 crazy single guys who used to - back then - go out, drink, and chase girls. This one gave me a #1 as a songwriter though, and it gave these guys I wrote it with their first career #1, too,” he finished as he elicited cheers out of the crowd the moment that he strummed the opening notes of “Lost In This Moment.”

Anderson, one of the two main draws of the lineup, gave the audience the perfect balance in his quick set as he played all the familiar with his own Top 10 songs, while also hitting some of the fan favorites and proudly displaying his songwriting catalog.

FULL SET LIST

1) Podunk

2) XXL

3) Every Time I Hear Your Name

4) Beer Run

5) Lost In This Moment

6) I Still Miss You

7) Pickin’ Wildflowers

 

With several #1 songs to their name and a packed house full of friends, family, and country music lovers, Love and Theft took the stage to a tremendous ovation and offered an hour-long, 14-song set that chronicled their entire career from their first radio single “Runaway,” to brand-new songs that will be getting released later this year.

The rowdy, rollicking “Let’s Get Drunk and Make Friends” opened the set and instantly got the crowd raising a glass in the air and swaying along with the melody.

However, where Love and Theft truly shined is the balance they offered within’ their set list as they spliced new songs between all their hits so that the crowd was already enthusiastically pulled in and attentive to hearing their newest material.

Some examples of this include:

Early in the set when they played their first radio Top 10 “Runway,” and they pushed that into “Better Off,” a song that Stephen Barker Liles introduced as “one that will be coming out later this year.”

The middle part of the set included their smash hit “Night That You’ll Never Forget,” which they backed into a song that they just released 2 weeks ago, “Mirror Mirror.”

And toward the end of their set after playing “Dancing in Circles,” they offered another new song that Liles said would be releasing in just a couple of weeks with, “Accidently On Purpose.”

As expected, their biggest hits absolutely satisfied the crowd and they could be heard singing along with Liles and Eric Gunderson on the very familiar hits such as “Angel Eyes,” “Wrong Baby Wrong,” and “If You Ever Get Lonely.” However, the crowd sat in a church-like silence amid the rich harmonies that layered over their acoustic guitars as the duo closed out their set with the very powerful “Whiskey On My Breath.”

FULL SET LIST

1) Let’s Get Drunk and Make Friends

2) Runaway

3) Better Off

4) Running Out Of Air

5) Wrong Baby Wrong

6) Night That You’ll Never Forget

7) Mirror Mirror

8) You Didn’t Want Me

9) Dancing In Circles

10) Accidently On Purpose

11) Angel Eyes

12) If You Ever Get Lonely

13) Need To Breathe

14) Whiskey On My Breath

 

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