Kane Brown’s drive-in concert: Where to watch
Following in the streamed footsteps of Garth Brooks, Blake Shelton and Metallica, country music hitmaker Kane Brown will star in a concert film screened at the Malco Summer Quartet Drive-in and at the Landers Center in Southaven.
The Landers Center booking is appropriate: Brown made his last public appearance in the Memphis area at the venue, which hosted a sold-out stop in Brown's "Live Forever" concert tour on Jan. 18, 2019.
The latest addition to the "Encore Drive-in Nights Live" series, the Kane Brown concert is set for Sept. 26. Tickets go on sale Thursday, Sept. 10, at ticketmaster.com. The cost is $56 per car until Sept. 18, at which time the price jumps to $76.
According to a press release from Encore Live, Brown's "brand-new, never-before-seen show" was staged and filmed exclusively for the drive-in market, "for one night only." The event is intended to enable fans to enjoy Brown "live" onstage even as the coronavirus shutdown prevents the artist from organizing a traditional concert tour.
According to Matt Ketcham, general manager of the Summer drive-in, the concerts screened to date — including Garth Brooks (June 27); Blake Shelton, Gwen Stefani and Trace Adkins (July 25); and Metallica (Aug. 29) — have been very successful. The shows have attracted sell-out crowds, although such crowds aren't as big as they would have been, pre-virus: Like its indoortheater counterparts, the drive-in has reduced admissions by 50%, to conform to Health Department social-distancing standards.
The Landers Center also hosted the screenings of the Blake Shelton and Metallica concerts. As with those events, the venue will replicate a drivein theater experience for the Kane Brown show, with a large screen set up in the parking lot so concertgoers can watch from their cars.
Brown, 26, is one of the hot new stars in country music, winning top honors in the Favorite Country Male Artist, Country Album and Country Song categories at the 2018 American Music Awards. The multiracial singer — his mother is white, his father is Black and part Cherokee — has "helped shift the perception of the genre," according to Encore Live, not only with his ethnic identity but by enlisting such collaborators as R&B artist Khalid and Oscar-winning songwriter John Legend for his most recent EP, "Mixtape Vol. 1."