Written by Kevin Black – Nov.03, 2019

First let me start with the Smart Financial Centre. As always, they have laid out a beautiful facility. The sound in the venue is incredible. That is if the sound engineer the artists brings knows his stuff and the sound man with Trisha Yearwood knows exactly what he’s doing.

The show started with Caylee Hammock. Accompanied by a guitarist who handled the backup vocals as well. Cayllee is a talker, she’s a story teller and she’s an energetic artist with a fantastic voice.

Trisha is a very interesting artist. It’s difficult for an artist that has a hit factory career and then take, well, basically a ten year vacation, then return to the studio and stage to find no one has forgotten them. Trisha’s fans know she didn’t really take a vacation. She has a successful cooking show on The Food Network along with several cookbooks.

“A Perfect Love” was the perfect song to open her show. Straight down the middle, not too slow and not too fast. As a musician myself, I knew from the intro it was going sound awesome. Trisha likes to make fun of herself. For instance, she let everyone know early on she has always leaned towards ballads, therefore she has to spread out her rocked up country material throughout the show so the show doesn’t bog down the energy in the room.

After picking it up with X’s and O’s, Trisha slowed it down showing off the sweet side of her vocal capabilities with “Georgia Rain”. She went on to dazzle her fans with “Thinking About You” and “Wrong Side of Memphis” which happens to be one of my favorites.

I wasn’t aware Trisha had a thing for Frank Sinatra. Ha, musically that is. She recently recorded an album of just that. We went from Trisha Yearwood hits to Sinatra hits. If you’r a fan of the “Big Band” era, it was your lucky night. She covered a few of Frank’s songs like “Come Fly With Me” and “One For My Baby”. Not my cup of tea but done very well by the band for not having any horns and have the number of musicians Frank carried with him. Her voice was very convincing as the story teller as well.

Then we came to ‘Walk Away Joe”. Another one of her major hits. I have alway been a forgiving fan when an artist loses track of the lyrics because, I’ve been there and done it. I have also been very impressed by the way an artist recovers from their mistakes. One piece of information I haven’t shared with you yet is Trisha was going through the” Life’s Cycle” changes while pouring her heart into the music, leaning over at one point letting the fan cool her down while blowing her hair wildly in every direction. We loved it!. During “Walk Away Joe” she struggled with the lyrics until she stopped the band, said something humorous about herself and started the song over only to give an unforgettable version of her hit song. That is how the professionals do it!

In case you’re wondering why the title Garth Who? I’m as big of a fan of Garth’s as anyone. You can imagine how we all anticipated his appearance. He did not come out and share the stage. However, I felt little disappointment because Trisha has everything I personally need in a concert to walk away satisfied. She’s beautiful, she’s funny, she has great songs, and she has a prettier voice than her husband. There, I said it, now get over it. My only disappointment was the I didn’t get a photo of the two of them.

Trisha explained to the audience how, instead of her leaving the stage at the end and pretending she’s leaving only for her fans to demand that she return for a few more songs while she waited right behind the curtain, she would skip that tradition and stay onstage for the encore. But when the two songs designed for the encore were over, she was gone. Ha!

Welcome Back Trisha Yearwood!

Cheers!

Kevin Black