April 29th at the Nugget Casino
Sparks NV April1, 2022 – Dwight Yoakam Live in Concert will make a swing West in April starting off with a stop at the Nugget Casino in sparks on April 29th at 8:00 pm.
Dwight Yoakam has sold more than 25 million albums worldwide, and he is a 21-time nominated, multiple GRAMMY Award winner. He has 12 gold albums and 9 platinum or multi-platinum albums, with five of those albums topping Billboard’s Country Albums chart and another 14 landing in the Top 10. Nearly 40 of Yoakam’s singles have charted on Billboard, with 14 peaking in the Top 10. Yoakam is a recipient of the Artist of the Year award from the Americana Music Association, the most prestigious award offered by the organization, he will be inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in the Songwriter/Artist category at the 49th anniversary Gala on October 14, 2019 in Nashville, TN.
Yoakam’s self-curated SiriusXM channel, titled Dwight Yoakam and The Bakersfield Beat ‘Where Country Went Mod’ launched in April of 2018. The channel celebrates the Bakersfield sound and those whom it has inspired. Guests have boasted the likes of Post Malone, Lukas Nelson, Beck, Chris Hillman, Jakob Dylan, Mike Nesmith and Mickey Dolans, Dave Alvin, and Jackie DeShannon, among others.
In 2016, Yoakam released his bluegrass album Swimmin’ Pools, Movie Stars… on Sugar Hill Records. Featuring a band of bluegrass luminaries, this album boasts a collection of reinterpreted favorites from his catalogue, as well as a cover of Prince’s “Purple Rain”. Produced by nine-time GRAMMY winner Gary Paczosa (Alison Krauss, Dolly Parton), Jon Randall (songwriter of “Whiskey Lullaby”), and Yoakam himself, and mixed by Chris Lord-Alge, this album reflects the love for bluegrass music that Yoakam developed at an early age in Kentucky and that has inspired him for many years thereafter. In 2018, Yoakam released two songs, “Pretty Horses” and “Then Came Monday” (the latter written with Chris Stapleton).
Tickets will only be available for purchase online through TICKETMASTER.COM.
Venue: Grand Ballroom
Times: Doors 6:30pm | Show 8pm
Tickets:
- Sections 1 – 3: $105
- Sections 4 – 6: $85
- Sections 7 – 9: $65
Ticket prices exclude all taxes and fees.
Dwight Yoakam
Swimmin’ Pools, Movie Stars…
The grass isn’t always greener on the other side, or bluer in this case, which may be why Dwight Yoakam hadn’t thought of doing a bluegrass album over the years. It was always already implicit in his music, from “Miner’s Prayer” on his first album 30 years ago to his one-off collaborations with Ralph Stanley and Earl Scruggs. If you listened hard, you could even hear that strain of mountain music in the melodies and harmonic sense of his most rocked-out country hits. He wasn’t consciously thinking through the years that he could bust out the mandolins to confirm his Kentucky bona fides – “Melodically, it’s just part of my nature,” Yoakam says, “part of the birthright, I guess, in my DNA.”
Yet here he is, releasing Swimmin’ Pools, Movie Stars… in the same year that he is celebrating the 30th anniversary of Guitars, Cadillacs, Etc., Etc.. Swimmin’ Pools, Movie Stars… harks back to that landmark debut in its obviously cheeky title, while otherwise looking even farther back by recasting some of Yoakam’s most classic songs in a style that not only predates cowpunk but antecedes his beloved Bakersfield sound. Yoakam even remakes “Guitars, Cadillacs” in the style of “Man of Constant Sorrow.” No one is ever going to mistake a star so renowned for favoring snug jeans with a Soggy Bottom Boy, but here, he clinches his status as at least an honorary Clinch Mountain lad. “And then Chris Lord-Alge, who has mixed my last 2 studio albums, entered the picture in LA and agreed to add a further edge of Beggars Banquet-esque rock and roll mystique, completing the journey with a masterfully unique sonic framing of the entire project. I believe it was the first bluegrass album that Chris has ever mixed.”
“It was part of Alison Krauss’ Union Station band colliding with the remnants of the Soggy Bottom band,” says Yoakam, talking about the four days of band tracking he did in Nashville and April with a group of acoustic all-stars he’d never worked with before. The ensemble included guitarist Bryan Sutton, fiddler Stuart Duncan, bassist Barry Bales, mandolin player Adam Steffey, and banjo player Scott Vestal, under the production oversight of Gary Paczosa (another Krauss veteran) and Jon Randall (the co-writer of country hits like “Whiskey Lullaby”). “And then I threw, I guess, a hillbilly version of the Beach Boys at it with my harmony vocals. That core bunch of players there in Nashville for those four days was a really fortuitous vortex, with those guys responding to what I wanted to do and me saying, ‘Look, let’s leave it loose and ragged at times.’ Rock and roll got some of its swagger from bluegrass. Let’s go back there and show some of that swagger if we can.”
Swimmin’ Pools, Movie Stars… started as, if not an assignment, at least a suggestion, and one he readily took to once he found the right recording window. “Kevin Welk had asked my managers a couple years ago if I would do a bluegrass album for his then-label Vanguard/Sugar Hill,” Yoakam says. “Subsequently they merged with Concord Music Group, which owned Rounder, and it became that entire music company, and they came back to us again this year. At the first ask, I had been in the middle of doing Second Hand Heart,” his 2015 return to the Warner Records stable from which he sprang three decades ago. “Cameron Strang, who runs Warners, graciously allowed me to take this year off in terms of delivering my next studio album for them (Warner) to do this project, because he knew it was a passion project for me.”
The original idea was to make it a covers album, before it ended up being an album of Dwight Yoakam covers, with one notable exception – a cover of Prince’s “Purple Rain.” “But when Gary and JR (Randall) came to do a meeting with me, they said, ‘You know, we started listening to your catalog, and we found songs where we thought, “Wow, that was never a single. Nobody ever heard that. Should we do that with him?”’ I let them come to me with titles that they liked. I didn’t really pick; they did. And we ended up with 11 tracks that had been on my earlier albums, but only two of them, ‘Guitars, Cadillacs’ and ‘Please, Please Baby,’ were ever hits. Only one other song had even been a single, ‘These Arms,’ and it didn’t crack the top 30. So I don’t know if ‘obscure’ is the word for these songs —people that had my albums have come across them — but they’re the tracks that were songs less traveled.”
