Anderson East will perform Sept. 8 at Niswonger PAC

Published 1:01 pm Wednesday, August 31, 2022

Touring in support of his fifth studio album Maybe We Never Die, which inspired  Billboard singles in “Hood of My Car,” and the number-12 hit “Madelyn,” the chart-topping roots rocker Anderson East plays a September 8 concert at Niswonger Performing Arts Center, displaying the musical gifts that led NPR to deem him “a perceptive record-maker and proven captivator of live crowds.”

Inspired by the musician Ben Folds, the Alabama native taught himself piano and wrote his first song in seventh grade, eventually working as a session musician and recording engineer after a post-college move to Nashville. In 2009, East self-released an album titled Closing Credits for a Fire under his birth name Mike Anderson, but began recording under the stage name Anderson East with the release of his subsequent EP Fire Demos. His first full-length album under his Anderson East moniker, 2012’s Flowers of the Broken Hearted, was made up of two records: one that he recorded in Los Angeles with session players Charlie Gillingham, Don Heffington, and Rob Wasserman, and a second recorded in Nashville with Tim Brennan and Daniel Scobey. A combined 15 songs long, Flowers of the Broken Hearted finds one CD made up of progressive-soul and Americana numbers, while the other boasts a darker rock sound. It also led to East’s first critical accolades, with Consequence of Sound calling the artist’s voice “an instrument with the ability to recall Ruyan Adams, develop of country twang, and even bring to mind a raspier, more immediate Michael Bublé.”

East followed that release with his major-label studio debut Delilah, which rose to the number-two spot on Billboard’s U.S. Heatseekers Chart and number seven on the U.S. Folk chart, with two of its singles – “Satisfy Me” and “Devil in Me” – landing on the Billboard Top 30. The artist’s “What Would It Take” appeared on the soundtrack for 2017’s Fifty Shades Darker, and the same year, East scored his first chart-topping song with “All on My Mind,” an eventual Grammy Award nominee (for Best American Roots Performance) released ahead of the Encore album’s debut in January of 2018. Another of the recording’s singles, “Girlfriend,” also became a top-five hit that helped East earn an Americana Music Honors & Awards citation for Emerging Artist of the Year, adding to Paste’s praise that the artist was “more interested in bringing back the groove and sweat of the region’s soul/R&B legacy than adding to the bro country ranks.”

Aaron Raitiere opens for Anderson East on September 8 at 7:30  p.m. Tickets start at $30 and are available online or in person at the NPAC box office, or by phone at 423-638-1679.