CMA Fest ends in style

As the 51st CMA Fest ended early Monday morning, it wasn’t clear what lay ahead for the quintessential country music festival over the next half-century — or the genre itself.

This isn’t entirely bad.

Recently, country music has been combined with folk, hip-hop and rock, gaining commercial success and cultural reach. The genre, now united under the main banner, became the forerunner of popular music.

This is evidenced by the crunching guitars and throaty howls of blue-collar and rural heavy metal HARDY delights legions of fans, as well as emo ballads and radio-ready pop from under-30 country pop favorites Megan Moroney and Bailey Zimmerman.

Add in traditionalists like Wyatt Flores, Carly Pearce and Zach Top, as well as event hosts Jelly Roll and Ashley McBryde, and it’s clear that the country music landscape in 2024 will be more sonically diverse than ever.

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Megan Moroney highlights a growing catalog of hits at Nissan Stadium

Over the course of four hours, award-winning country star Megan Moroney headlined the Riverside Stage and then performed to a crowd ten times her size at Nissan Stadium.

CMA Fest ends in style

The “Lucky” singer’s performance in front of country music’s biggest crowd came almost exactly a month before the release of her second album, “Am I OK?”

Moroney, 26, is so famous because she writes and performs songs that strive to impart hard-won youthful wisdom through an understanding tone that encourages social empathy.

On the CMA Fest stage, her growing confidence in her musical repertoire and performing skills shone as brightly as her singing and songwriting.

The boisterous honky-tonker “Lucky” began her set with rock and roll guitars straight from the era of the 1950s Fender Stratocaster.

After this song, “I’m Not Pretty”, the young women in the crowd screamed their approval at her performance: they were able to sing along to the loudest voices ever heard at Nissan Stadium during CMA Fest 2024.

“Man On The Moon,” the track released at the beginning of “Am I OK,” has been out for less than a month, but the artist’s passionate fans were already singing along: “Houston, he’s a problem / He leaves, then he calls / He’s got a headache and a half and I can’t win .

With a custom DanielXDiamond x Gibson acoustic guitar strapped to it, embellished with rhinestones, she invited her brother (who taught her how to play the guitar) on stage to join the duo for another recent single, “No Caller ID.”

It’s a modern, mournful country ballad, delivered after the main character receives a late-night phone call after two months of therapy – but struggles with self-betrayal, unable to escape the love-filled clutches of a toxic ex-boyfriend.

Singing along to Moroney’s set is a strange, rapturous exercise in celebrating the glass that is always half empty.

She ended her performance with “Tennessee Orange,” her signature song that elicited maximum euphoric reactions from the audience.

Moroney is aware that as an artist who has already created a catalog that is attracting huge attention, she can launch an incredible career.

“I feel completely new to this, but I feel like we’re building something special.”

Carly Pearce’s set shows a heart still healing

Carly Pearce’s day at CMA Fest began with her third annual Carly’s Closet pop-up store, where fans could purchase carefully selected clothing, shoes and accessories from her personal collection to benefit the CMA Foundation.

In typical Pearce style, the event reflected a lifetime of lifelong passions (“as a little girl, all I dreamed about was country music”) and combined elements of the roots of country music with a modern twist – in this case, echoing the ’90s. Autograph booth installation Superstars Fan Fair at the Nashville Fairgrounds.

She then took the stage at Nissan Stadium, decked out in glitter from her torso to her toes.

The Grammy winner is knee-deep in the season leading up to the release of her fourth studio album, “Hummingbird.”

Like the set opener “Rock Paper Scissors,” the album’s cuts highlight what happens when a strong-willed person prematurely emerges from a broken heart.

Interestingly, its follow-up on Sunday night was 2021’s “Next Girl”: an immediate, scathing response to heartbreak.

Both songs can be loaded with subject matter. However, Pearce’s veteran bluegrass rock band performed it with energetic joy.

Next up was the mandolin-backed “What He Didn’t Do,” another touching ballad about an ex-partner who is unable to remain emotionally available in a relationship. But its chorus sounds perfect when performed by screaming voices in a National Football League stadium.

Pearce’s “hummingbird” material sounds like “Part II: The Greatest Hits” in country music history. “Truck on fire” hits like “Before He Cheats” poured into “Kerosene.”

Pearce then performed a solo version of her duet with Chris Stapleton, “We Don’t Fight Anymore,” and her own version of her Lee Brice single, “I Hope You’re Happy Now.”

Bailey Zimmerman performs her biggest set yet at CMA Fest, ends with ‘Religious’

Bailey Zimmerman’s ecstatic approach to topping the country charts every six months for the past two years is most joyfully expressed in his live sets.

The 24-year-old from a small town in southern Illinois emphasized in an interview with The Tennessean before the show that he was looking for love, occasionally traveling on tour with Morgan Wallen, accompanied by his mother and his beloved golden retriever, Marley May.

This background makes his material sound like he’s a combination of a country healer and an Instagram influencer.

Kicking off his set with his 2023 hit “Religious,” he quickly set the record for the most piercing screeches in a single song in a set over the CMA Fest weekend.

The crowd knew every word of the chart-topping “Where It Ends” and waved their phone flashlights to the heart-wrenching ballad “Rock and A Hard Place.”

It’s been five years since Zimmerman was a gas pipeline builder and a non-singer-songwriter who raised truck suspensions.

He is now a beloved and God-fearing festival performer, moved to tears by the chance that he must fall in love and change his position in life through the power of song.

“I’ll be back next year,” he said, impressed by everything.

HARDY conquers the largest audience in the country at the end of CMA Fest

Over the past half-century, HARDY’s name has topped more than a half-dozen Billboard charts.

A year ago, the major country singer-songwriter’s desire to double down on his love of mid-2000s radio and CD-ready hard rock had Nissan Stadium patrons packing the exits.

Now, playing chart-topping pop music like it was loaded with nitroglycerine, the Philadelphia, Mississippi native unleashed his single “ROCKSTAR” to kick off his CMA Fest 2024 closing set.

The crowd roared.

Then came “JACK.” The song is an ode to the dangers of alcohol addiction. In January 2023, he told The Tennessean that alcohol could be replaced with cocaine, fentanyl or another substance to understand the song’s impact.

It’s not necessarily headbanging material.

However, before taking the stage, HARDY told The Tennessean that he believes many pop-country fans have a deep-seated need to exorcise the emotions that exist in the subgenre’s harder-edged, guitar-driven rendition.

As soon as Drop D’s riffs, powerful drum sounds and screaming choruses took hold, the energy in Nissan Stadium changed profoundly.

The scathing ballad “PSYCHO” had fans in the stands screaming in mock antagonism at their friends while singing about terribly toxic relationships.

HARDY never rests on its laurels.

So, to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the timeless country rock jam “Save A Horse, Ride A Cowboy,” he brought Big & Rich to the stage.

By meerna

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