Christian McCaffrey played piano at a country music concert. Should he quit his day job?
NFL fans probably have a general idea of what they might be able to reasonably expect Christian McCaffrey to do during your average Carolina Panthers game.
That is, there’s a decent chance the guy will wind up being pretty exciting to watch.
But very few ticket holders could have known exactly what kind of performance to expect from the Panthers’ star running back going into Friday night’s “22 & Troops Benefit Concert Starring Zach Bryan with Christian McCaffrey” — an event at The Fillmore Charlotte that (obviously) traded heavily on his name while also leaving much to the imagination in the run-up to it.
In other words, one had to wonder: How much would he be involved in the show? And perhaps just as importantly, how talented would he prove to be at ... whatever it is he would wind up doing during it?
The answers we got over the course of Friday night’s 18-song, 90-minute concert turned out to be fairly straightforward: McCaffrey was somewhat involved, and he is somewhat talented at ... playing the piano.
Before I go any further, let me quickly lay out a little bit of backstory to provide some context for those who might need it.
Bryan (who, like McCaffrey, is 25 years old) is not yet a mainstream country music star but has amassed a fervent fan base thanks to TikTok and Instagram, where he’s posted a number of homemade music videos that have achieved viral-hit status. Adding to his appeal to young country fans is the fact that he has active-duty status in the military — as an ordnanceman at the U.S. Navy’s air station on Whidbey Island in Washington state.
The military angle also appealed to McCaffrey, who had been wanting to make veterans and the military a focus of his charitable foundation. The two actually didn’t know each other before this spring; McCaffrey told me before the show that he met Bryan after reaching out to him on Instagram about his ideas for helping those with military ties. “And we just kinda hit it off,” McCaffrey explained.
In May, his foundation launched a project called 22 and Troops aimed at helping U.S. active-duty military, veterans, frontline workers and families coping with trauma and PTSD. Not long afterward, the concert was announced.
Although we didn’t figure he’d be doing any singing during the show, he confirmed it in our chat: “It’s a quick no,” he said.
Piano, on the other hand, was a firm yes.
His deep interest in and love of music, particularly his affinity for playing the piano, is something McCaffrey has spoken about often in interviews. He even was featured playing Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata in a hype video for the Panthers’ 2019 season.
It’s difficult to know how good someone really is at being a performer, however, until you are able to see that someone give a performance with your own eyes, live — and I was sure lots of people would come out for this because they were curious about his level of involvement and his level of talent.
In fact, I figured McCaffrey was the main reason why the show sold out all of the roughly 2,000 tickets at $40 to $125 a pop.
But I think I might have been wrong about that.
To my surprise, I spotted only one McCaffrey jersey and one (former) Panther (Luke Kuechly) queuing up to go inside at 8:30 p.m.; meanwhile, dozens of people were wearing cowboy hats. That was the first indication that I’d pegged this show incorrectly.
(Quick aside: Driving in on NC Music Factory Boulevard, it was pretty wild to see the massive line that snaked along the sidewalk for several hundred yards. It’s a sight none of us have seen in awhile, and due to how we’ve all lived for the past 16 months it was mind-warping to comprehend that such a large crowd was going to fit inside The Fillmore’s relatively modest-sized space.)
The second indication that I’d pegged this show incorrectly was hearing a large swath of the crowd of mostly twentysomething fans raucously chant Bryan’s first name as they took slugs from tallboy cans of PBR and Truly Lemonade while waiting for the concert to start. No one chanted McCaffrey’s name beforehand.
They both garnered deafening roars, though, when they walked out onto the stage at 9:15 p.m., Bryan wearing a black Garth Brooks T-shirt and McCaffrey clad in a plain white T-shirt, ripped jeans and suede cowboy boots.
“We’re gonna get rowdy tonight, alright?” McCaffrey said in his welcome address to the crowd right before taking his place to the left of the stage at the helm of a gleaming Yamaha grand piano.
Yet from the outset, the Panthers’ running back didn’t seem to have a rowdy bone in his body.
During the opening song, “God Speed,” Bryan and McCaffrey were the only two on stage through the first verse, with the latter dutifully running through a pleasant but relatively simple progression of chords that receded further into the window dressing of the song after the electric guitarist, the fiddler, the upright bassist and the drummer joined in.
McCaffrey did the same routine on the next song — no runs, just chords, nothing fancy — and it began to take on the air of a kid playing a piano recital in the fifth grade. And don’t get me wrong, he can play fine. But there was no indication that he was anything more than an intermediate piano player.
He seemed a little rigid, a little nervous. Also, if you could get a look over his shoulder from behind, you could see that the piece of paper on the piano’s music desk was the setlist and not sheet music.
By his own admission, he plays by ear.
“I tried it,” McCaffrey told me when asked whether he’d followed up on his desire to learn how to read music a couple of years ago. “I had a teacher and everything who was coming twice a week, but ... I stopped. Honestly, I don’t have a whole lot of time. It takes so much time to start from scratch and learn sheet music, but honestly, too, I have more fun just playing by ear and playing the songs I want play and how I want play them.”
If you think about it, then, it’s actually rather impressive that he’s able to hold his own with a professional band as an amateur pianist who can’t read music — that he was able to remember the chords and put them in the right places at the right times.
I paid close attention to him all night, and I didn’t detect any mistakes.
That said, he didn’t exactly play all night. For long, strange stretches, sometimes four or five songs in a row, McCaffrey wouldn’t have anything to contribute musically; so he’d just sit on the piano bench and nod along, or mouth the words, or tap his boot, or scan the crowd, grinning and lifting his chin when someone would make eye contact with him.
It was as if they decided he couldn’t abandon the stage for the songs he didn’t figure into, perhaps for fear that those who did come for McCaffrey would feel short-changed. At the same time, leaving him out there seemed to put him in the awkward position of ... I don’t know, trying to look busy?
By mid-show, you were either in one of two camps: Either you became fixated on studying his behavior, as if he’d become kind of like a zoo animal that you couldn’t take your eyes off of, or you hadn’t been paying much attention to him to begin with, because you came for Bryan in the first place (and early on it was clear most concertgoers were devotees who knew every word to every song, the third indication that I’d been wrong about whose name most helped sell this thing out).
Then, right before it was time to go home, something remarkable happened.
During Bryan’s jubilant ode to partying with the guys — “Revival,” the night’s closing number — and then again during the band intros, McCaffrey launched into rollicking rock-’n’-roll solos that were not just a progression of simple chords, that indicated that maybe he is more than an intermediate piano player.
It was almost like for 30 seconds at a time he turned into Jerry Lee Lewis ... er, well, maybe I shouldn’t get too carried away.
But it was a triumphant moment in the show, not just for him, but for everybody who’d come specifically to see him perform, however big or small that contingent might have been.
The sound of his keys really and truly did finally come to life, the man who’s so quick on his feet in his day job finally proving that — when you sit him in front of a piano and give him a moment to shine — he can also be quite quick and quite talented with his hands.
McCaffrey on a future music career
“I don’t know. I mean, that would be really cool. Obviously, I have another job right now. But I play for the fun. ... I think practicing with these guys is a humbling experience ’cause you start to understand how good real musicians are. But no, I just do it for fun right now. If that happens, that’ll be somewhere down the road if I really start taking it seriously. But for me, it’s really just a hobby.”
McCaffrey on 22 and Troops
“I heard the statistic that 22 troops commit suicide every day — 22 veterans. That really hit me to the core as somebody who unfortunately has been to a lot of suicide funerals in my life. ... I know I don’t have all the answers. I have a vision of how I’d love this to go. But I think the key is just getting in touch with the right people who do know how to save people and maintaining a humility about it. It’s gonna take all of us, as Americans, to come together and to really help the people who help us.”
To support the cause
To donate to the 22 and Troops project, text “donate” to 704-324-8344 or visit 22andTroops.org. Those who donate $22 or more will receive an official “Comeback Coin” from the Christian McCaffrey Foundation.
Zach Bryan’s setlist
1. “God Speed”
2. “Waterwell”
3. “Oklahoma City”
4. “Shivers Down Spines”
5. “Ninth Cloud”
6. “Man That’s Never Known You”
7. “Let You Down”
8. “Condemned”
9. “Doing Fine”
10. “Moon in Oklahoma”
11. “Pain Sweet Pain”
12. “Dress Blues”
13. “Hope Again”
14. “Flying or Crying”
15. “Traveling Man”
16. “Snow”
17. “Heading South”
18. “Revival”
