Live music is back: The Avett Brothers are coming home to NC for a drive-in concert
If you’ve been missing live concerts by A-list musical acts, there’s hope on the horizon (for fans of folk-rock, at least):
Three-time Grammy Award nominees The Avett Brothers are set to play their first live show in six months on Saturday, Aug. 29, at Charlotte Motor Speedway. Concertgoers will be socially distanced in their cars — following the growing trend of artists who usually fill arenas and amphitheaters testing the drive-in concept.
The Concord natives will perform live on the backstretch of the racing surface, while the performance will be viewable on the speedway’s 16,000-square-foot video screen.
“We’re going to be doing the drive-in movie kind-of style,” Seth Avett said in a video message on the band’s website Tuesday. “There’s going to be room for over 1,500 cars. There’s going to be this gigantic screen they have at the speedway.”
Tickets will be sold per car and will be available for pre-sale on Thursday, with the on-sale opening up to the general public on Friday. For tickets and more information, visit avettbrothersdrivein.com. Prices have not yet been set.
“You’ll be able to hear the music through your car stereo,” Seth Avett said. “But we’ll be there, we’ll be on stage performing. It will be our first show in six months. We’re really excited.”
The North Carolina Music Hall of Fame inductees — Seth Avett, Scott Avett, Bob Crawford and Joe Kwon — will be celebrating the release of their new album “The Third Gleam,” to be released the day before. (Ticket-holders will be eligible to purchase a limited-edition vinyl of “The Third Gleam.”) They have not performed in Charlotte since staging a pair of shows at Bojangles’ Coliseum to close out 2018.
Their announcement follows the recent news that the speedway will host a filmed performance featuring Blake Shelton on Saturday, July 25, as part of a virtual concert series called Encore Drive-In Nights. Shelton will be joined by Gwen Stefani and Trace Adkins in the pre-recorded show, which also will be viewed by fans drive-in-style. Tickets for that show went on sale Tuesday via ticketmaster.com/encore-blakeshelton.
Meanwhile, both the Badin Road Drive-In in Albemarle and the Hounds Drive-In in Kings Mountain will be serving as stops on a drive-in tour headlined by contemporary Christian band Casting Crowns — Tuesday, July 28, and Friday, Aug. 21, respectively. (Hounds owner Preston Brown also hinted that additional announcements about live tours featuring widely recognizable national artists could be forthcoming soon.)
Country-music star Garth Brooks also notably released a one-night-only pre-recorded show last month that sold out both of those Charlotte-area drive-ins.
And the U.S.’s largest concert promoter, Live Nation, staged “Live From The Drive-In” this past weekend, a summer drive-in concert series set in parking lots outside of big indoor venues (in St. Louis, Nashville and Indianapolis) that featured individual shows by country stars Brad Paisley and Darius Rucker, rapper Nelly and others.
This story was originally published July 14, 2020 at 12:17 PM.
