If country music was baseball, Brett Young would have to be a pitcher. A tour is a season, every show a game. This year’s concerts have been kicking off at the top of the first inning, with songs pleasing to home-field fans such as “Sleep Without You” and “Left Side of Leavin’” from Young’s 2017 eponymous debut album. As a visiting team playing on tour in Europe this spring, Young and his band knocked it out of the park with bestselling hits “Mercy,” “Here Tonight” and his most ubiquitous hit “In Case You Didn’t Know.”
There are definite parallels between the pressure of manning a mound and being in the spotlight as a singer-songwriter in the spotlight on a concert stage. “There are variables that you cannot control and variables very much in your control,” said Young hours before a July concert in Durant, Okla. “I could go out and execute the exact pitch that was called for in that circumstance. If the hitter guesses right, he could still beat me, right?”
Young knows how to mix up his game; he knows it’s different playing for a festival crowd than for people that bought tickets for his tour stops this year in Oslo, Stockholm, Manchester and Kansas City, Mo. It’s been eight years since the release of “In Case You Didn’t Know” as a single, which would peak at No. 2 as a single by April. It also introduced his confessional “Caliville” sound and established his musical persona as a sensitive one-woman man destined to build his career on a foundation of family.
If things in life had gone the way he’d initially planned, Young would probably be a former professional baseball player today, recently transitioned into managing a professional team. An injury revealed a different destiny for the Anaheim-born California native, who shifted his primary focus from athletics to his singing ability and began songwriting in earnest. He had a muse in a longtime girlfriend who became his future wife and mother to his two daughters, and a dedication to them that manifested in confidence.
“This is a very insecure business,” said Young. “It’s not for everybody, but I think the biggest confidence-builder for me really had nothing to do with me at all. It was when I started realizing this is a job, and this supports my family. I can’t just kind of phone it in. Just because I’m not checking in 9-to-5 Monday through Friday and sitting at a desk, this is still what feeds my family.”
Young tended bar in L.A. before heading to Nashville and finding interest for his songs. His voice is an expressive instrument, coming from a comfort zone fans of songwriting collaborator Gavin DeGraw (“Chapters”) and Jason Mraz would find familiar. Audiences drawn in by No. 1 radio hits “Catch” and “Lady” have evolved into a fan base that will grow with Young’s song catalog and may get to hear him perform latest single “Good Night Into Good Morning,” which rolls out five days before he performs in Las Vegas.
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