At the beginning of Tyler Childers’ sold-out show at Hollywood Casino Amphitheatre, Childers noted that “besides festivals and things, this is, like, the biggest Tyler Childers gig we’ve ever played.” Indeed, the place was packed with 18,000 fans who, incredibly, were on their feet for the entire two-hour show singing along to songs that get zero radio airplay. Even during a five-song opening sequence featuring Childers alone on stage with his acoustic guitar, the crowd — heavily composed of young fans in boots and ballcaps — squealed with recognition at the first guitar chords of each song.
For the neotraditional faithful, Childers has been one of the saviors of gravel-road Southern-twang outlaw-revival country with enough Willie whine and Waylon thump to float a battalion of corn-liquor cowboys on a sea of dip spit. But as much as Childers gets christened as the keeper of the honky-tonk flame, his St. Louis show saw him shifting away from that image. Gone was the beardy hellraiser vibe replaced by a clean-shaven guy in a cardigan sweater sipping from a variety of hot teas.
Most strikingly, Childers played guitar on just half of the evening’s songs, a marked change from previous tours as the East Kentucky tunesmith is turning into a country crooner accompanied at times by only piano (Chase Lewis, excellent). However, Childers still has that feral stare and his tenor drawl that dances on a knife-edge, and when he busts out in full squall, he sounds like a rooster that backed into the electric fence (in a good way).
Whatever he was doing, it worked with the crowd. Childers certainly seems like an unlikely TikTok sensation, but that’s exactly how legions of teenagers discovered him and fell for songs like “Feathered Indians” (which he didn’t play, to the chagrin of many) and “All Your’n,” the night’s biggest singalong. “Lady May” was also popular with this crowd, played during the solo segment in which Childers sat around a mock ’70-era living room complete with an old floor-standing television (playing actual TV shows all night), sewing-machine tables and retro lamps.
Once Childers’ band, the Food Stamps, came out, the stage design revealed a wooded enclave scene with stuffed forest critters scattered around, including a pair of kissing squirrels perched atop the piano, and at times animal sounds were pumped in between, and even during, songs. A hotblooded version of “Cluck Ol’ Hen” was in fact accompanied by substantial chicken clucking while the band swapped solos, and Tyler temporarily picked up the fiddle though he spent as much time tuning it as playing it.
With Childers’ latest album taking a hard look at how his Christian upbringing shaped him, the show had a strong gospel thread throughout, one that came with contrasting sonic and thematic elements. On “Purgatory,” electric guitar danced with pedal steel and swirling organ to create a country-funk stew. “Way of the Triune God” was given the killer rafter-raising “hallelujah version” treatment from the album, making for the night’s most Jesus-y moment. Then again, “Can I Take My Hounds to Heaven?” punctuated by slinky bass groove (played by the awesome Craig Burletic, who looks like ’80s-era Billy Squier) looked at other options for the afterlife. (Thanks, by the way, to drummer Rodney Elkins for sporting a St. Louis Cardinals T-shirt; we need all the help we can get.)
The venue didn’t smell much like church. The prevailing aroma suggested that much of the crowd was higher than the grocery bill. The fragrance paired nicely with the double shot of the perpetually badass “White House Road” and “Country Squire,” Chiders as his outlaw-country-est. He would return to that sound late in the set with a fiddle-abetted “House Fire” that built to a rocking cinder-and-smoke climax.
The show ended with Childers singing an a cappella version of Cory Branan’s “Sour Mash,” and those who stayed until that performance sat in their vehicles for over an hour waiting to get out of the parking lot. But for a crowd that had just traveled paths with Childers both beer-hoisting-ly familiar and incendiary-ly new, it was a damn good feeling to run these roads.
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