Lakes Jam 2021 fans may get “Lost in this Moment” and will not want to “Stay Home” Friday, June 25, when Big & Rich hits the Bud Light Main Stage at Brainerd International Raceway, north of Brainerd on Highway 371.
Lakes Jam is an outdoor music festival that combines country and rock with premier camping. This year’s event will be presented by Farm Bureau Financial Services. The artists will perform on the Bud Light Main Stage Thursday through Saturday, June 24-26.
Big & Rich are America’s Technicolor cowboys, brothers-in-arms in service to the creed that great music has no boundaries, according to their bio on the Lakes Jam website. Individually, John Rich and Big Kenny are first-rate musicians, songwriters, producers and entertainers. “Together, they are one of the most truly original musical forces ever unleashed on a welcoming world,” the bio stated. “Big & Rich have made a career of being relatable and musically relevant since exploding into the public consciousness in 2003 as the rarest of breeds — true country music game changers. With 2004’s triple-platinum ‘Horse of a Different Color,’ they were able to tap into the best strands of a wide spectrum of popular music, filter them through their pens and voices and produce a sound that is instantly recognizable, if not classifiable.”
From 1992-98, John Rich was a member of the country music band Lonestar, in which he played bass guitar and alternated with Richie McDonald as lead vocalist. After departing from the band in 1998, he embarked on a solo career on BNA Records in the late 1990s, releasing two singles for the label and recording “Underneath the Same Moon,” which was not released until 2006. In 2001, he self-released “Rescue Me,” an album he was inspired to record by a cancer patient named Katie Darnell.
By 2003, he joined William Kenneth Alphin, who’s best known as his stage name, Big Kenny, to form the duo Big & Rich, who released three albums on Warner Bros. The duo recorded six studio albums and charted 19 singles on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart.
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Before Big & Rich, Big Kenny recorded a solo album, “Live a Little,” for Hollywood Records in 1999 — although it was not released until 2005 and fronted a band called luvjOi. He also has written or co-written several of Big & Rich’s songs with Rich, as well as singles for Gretchen Wilson, Jason Aldean, McBride & the Ride and Tim McGraw. His first solo single, “Long After I’m Gone,” was released to country radio on Aug. 3, 2009, from the album, “The Quiet Times of a Rock and Roll Farm Boy.”
