Lady Antebellum are great storytellers, I found out. I saw them perform at their Palms Resort Casino residency inside the intimate Pearl Theater.
I’ve been to enough concerts to bore me and piss me off to ever attending any of them again no matter who is performing. Waiting around for whatever artist to start on time is enough to drive me up the wall. Never understood the being late to your own event thing.
It’s also usually the same thing. Some type of good enough production or not. Incredible singing, sure, and incredible dancing too (for some anyway), and that’s it. Nothing remotely new about concert productions. But Lady Antebellum, which was my first country music concert ever (not my typical first choice of music), picked-up their audience in their busted down truck and upgraded them throughout their musical career journey to a mega tour bus.
Personal footage of them writing songs and recording vocals were displayed the jumbo Pearl Theater screens. Comments were made between them, wishing and dreaming of the day they’d have an actual comfy tour bus rather than riding in their pick-up truck. It was was both vulnerable and unreal to think that they started out their life journeys just like us. It was a simple production, but an impactful one.
It was a great reminder that having dreams is still a thing and that hard work and perseverance to realize those dreams will too always be in fashion. It left the audience thinking: if they could do it, why can’t I?
They jumped off the main stage to engage with their fans, who sporadically also left their seats to slow dance. The band’s relationship was gravital, and their fans couldn’t help by Facebook Live the entire thing. To my surprise, I knew a few of their songs and even I, an R&B music and classical fan, couldn’t help but sing along. They did some great soul renditions, too, I forgot to mention.
At first, Lady Antebellum as resident artists for the Palms Resort Casino in Las Vegas made no sense to me considering Palms’ out-of-state marketing efforts have been focused on placing themselves amongst a trendier pop culture crowd like SXSW, for example. Then I remembered that they too have a knack for storytelling. Palms‘ entire property is an immersive experiential traveling experience huge and sole thanks to the art curation, which I’ll guess is by way of Tal Cooperman, their creative director.
The $64 million dollar question to a usual anti-concert and festival attendee/snob (hello, that’s me) is: will I see them again? Absolutely. You should too, if you’re in town. Tickets range between only $30 up to $500-plus for premiere seating. If you need a little inspiration, they’ll do. At the end, that’s what music is about. It’s about feeling and connecting, and they do just that.
Lady Antebellum was on-time, I’d like to note, and thank God.
