Rising country star Chase Bryant of "Little Bit Of You," who learned to play guitar upside down and backwards at age 3, has never been to the Brainerd lakes area-but this will soon change.
Bryant, 23, is performing in this year's Lakes Jam music fest, taking the stage prior to country headliner Toby Keith. He will perform at 8 p.m. June 24 during country night of the three-day music fest at Brainerd International Raceway.
Lakes Jam, founded in 2012, is a music fest that unites country and classic rock.
"We're playing a brand new show," Bryant said Tuesday in a phone interview while at his home in Nashville. "We're coming out of a week of rehearsals and we've made a couple of changes ... It'll be wide and animated and will be an action-packed show with a lot of energy."
Bryant has been around music his whole life. Raised in the small town of Orange Grove, Texas, Bryant's grandfather on his mother's side played piano in Roy Orbison's first two bands and later for Waylon Jennings. His uncles co-founded the group Ricochet, which had several hits in the 90s.
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"I picked up a right-handed guitar and played it left-handed," Bryant said.
The only thing he ever wanted to do since he was a child was play music. "I did things a little different than everyone else. I picked it up and I could never put it down. A lot of people told me I couldn't play it that way, so therefore I had to do it."
Bryant watched his grandfather and uncles play music through the years. As he watched their successes, he learned what he should and shouldn't do with his own music.
"I figured out early on what kind of person I wanted to be and what I didn't want to be," Bryant said. "My family played a major role in who I am today. ... I started to figure out who Chase Bryant was early on.
"I didn't want to be anyone but me. I am an honest musician. I'm the guy who writes songs on what I know about and makes records that hopefully other people want to live by. ... I'm just a guy from a small town who picked up a guitar and made a name with it."
Bryant, who wrote about "400 lousy songs" before he wrote his first good one, co-writes all of his songs and plays lead guitar on his studio recordings. He said a song with special meaning to him is "Change Your Name," on extended play.
"It's a love song about what you look for in a relationship," Bryant said. "It's a guy who I want to be and hope to look forward to someday getting married and having kids, a family. ... It's a song that paints that picture for me."
Bryant said his new single, "Little Bit Of You," is the song that made him realize he was on the right path to success.
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"You have a couple of hits and you start to figure out that things are going OK and you're doing something right," Bryant said. "You get to a point where the wheels are rolling, and you want them to keep on turning. ... For me it was after 'Little Bit Of You' came out."
Interwoven with the story of a long-distance romance, the music video for "Little Bit of You" was filmed at tour stops across the U.S. and features live performances from Bryant, his official website stated. "Little Bit of You" is a Top 10 Vevo Country video, a CMT Hot 20 video and a Great American Country Top 20 Country Countdown video.
Bryant is one of only two male solo artists to earn a Top 10 hit in 2015 with a debut single. "Take It On Back" spent 14 straight weeks on the CMT Hot 20 Countdown, seven weeks on the Greatest American Country Top 20 Country Countdown and was a Top 20 Most Watched Video on Vevo TV Nashville.
In a release from Bryant's publicist, he stated, "There were 20 guitars in town and I owned all Conway Twitty, Merle Haggard, Tom Petty, Vince Gill, Bob Wills, Steve Wariner, Bryan Adams and more. ... I knew I wanted to play mainstream country, I always knew.
"(Songwriting) goes back, of course, to getting my heart broken in school. Some girl broke up with me. I may have been 11 or 12 and I just wrote it down. I was never great at reading, but I liked words, phrases and sentences. The only way I knew to let people know me is through writing," Bryant stated in the release.
The release stated Roy Orbison's late widow, a Nashville publisher, signed Bryant, which led him to BBR Music Group imprint Red Bow Records, to which he signed in August 2013.
JENNIFER STOCKINGER may be reached at jennifer.stockinger@brainerddispatch.com or 218-855-5851. Follow me at www.twitter.com/jennewsgirl on Twitter.
