The heartthrobs of country showed the audience what unmarred talent was all about Wednesday night at the Center for the Arts.
Kelly Pickler, Steve Holy, Donovon Chapman and Jake Owens all nonchalantly strutted across the stage to perform an incredibly personal acoustic concert.
The artists' evening attire consisted of jeans and tee shirts, making the audience feel as if they were hanging around the campfire with the performers.
Despite the audience's grumbling amidst a late start, there was a lot of talk about Kelly Pickler, a former "American Idol" contestant, and Steve Holy, who was rocketed to stardom with his first big hit "Good Morning Beautiful."
Then the lights dimmed and the crew lined up guitars against a simple row of stools. There was no headliner or opening act, and each performer was allotted equal playing time.
In fact, the artists weren't even sure whom to start with. To cure the problem, they directed their question towards tons of screaming teenage girls; unsurprisingly, the audience roared for Pickler.
The former "Idol" contestant crooned with her incredibly rich voice, made even richer by the fact that there was little instrumentation to detract from it.
Pickler didn't start the show with her current single "Red High Heels," but instead with a song called, "Things that Never Cross a Man's Mind." The highly charged, estrogen-fueled song set the tone for much of the concert, and the other men onstage followed suit with their own tough, cowboy music. In fact, Kelly was the only female out of the ten, and while the other artists teased her about how cute she was, she undeniably held her own.
Chapman followed Pickler, telling a little anecdote about himself before every song. The audience learned that Mr. Chapman is Hawaiian, served in the Special Forces and has a tattoo on his rear end. Despite the personal revelations, it was Chapman's undeniable talent that resonated most with the crowd.
"This guy is going to be as big as Keith Urban, I just know it," said Jerry, an autoworker from Arcade.
Considering that Urban is a Grammy-winning country singer with three platinum albums and movie star Nicole Kidman as his wife, it looks like he's not doing too bad for himself. The musician's first song was "Your all I Need," but he really won over the audience later with his ukulele and his Hawaiian styled remixes of well known songs like "Somewhere Over the Rainbow," "Take On Me," "No Woman no Cry" and even the gangsta rap classic "Nothin' but a G' Thang." Chapman's innovative renditions left the audience roaring.
Throughout the concert, the artists were genuine, light-hearted and constantly joking around with each other onstage. The next artist in the row was Jake Owen, whose talent is phenomenal, as illustrated through his latest single "Starting With Me."
That being said, the guy was a real showman, appealing especially to the ladies. He laid it on pretty thick, especially while singing his first song of the night "The Bad in Me," blaming it all on women, of course.
The last in the group to perform turned out to be the resident wily veteran Steve Holy. The musician started off with a very catchy, creative smart song called "Men Buy the Drinks, Women Call the Shots," which Kelly Pickler made reference to several times while being teased by the boys.
He also sang the song, "Good Morning Beautiful," which, according to him, rescued his career from the oil rigging business. Along with that came his current single "Come on Rain." The show ended with Holy's current mammoth hit, "I Got a Brand New Girlfriend." Luckily for the artist, he didn't have to sing most of the song, because the audience did it for him.
Unfortunately, the concert ended very abruptly, and without an encore. Even though all the performers were onstage together the whole time, none of them actually sang together. While "I Got a Brand New Girlfriend" was a satisfactory way to end the show, it would have been nice if the artists had come together for one last big bang.
