Singer Kane Brown brings his tour to Bon Secours Wellness Arena in Greenville

Kane Brown spent much of his 2022 touring year outside of the United States to promote his latest album, “Different Man.” Now this spring, fans on these shores get their turn to catch Brown in person.

Brown is bringing his "Drunk or Dreaming" Tour to the Greenville area. The show is at 7 p.m. Saturday, March 18, at Bon Secours Wellness Arena. Available tickets start at $60.

One thing that seems certain is there’s no musical place Brown would rather be than on stage. That’s not something he would have said in years past.

“When people used to ask me what is your favorite part about music I would always say the writing process and being in the studio,” Brown said during an early March interview. “I wish I could be the artist that could just record and not ever have to get on stage. And now the stage is my favorite thing. I probably wouldn’t do music anymore if I wasn’t on stage.”

So what has changed for Brown when it comes to doing concerts?

“I think it’s just getting comfortable. I’ve found like another person that’s not me when I’m on stage,” he said. “The Kane on stage is very talkative, outgoing. My team tells me the way I hold the microphone, they can tell if it’s about to turn into a comedy show or not. Yeah, I just feel like it’s almost like a therapy session to me when I’m on stage. It’s super fun.”

It makes sense that Brown hadn’t hit his stride as a live performer until the fairly recent past.

Kane Brown used a George Strait song to help rack up 7 million views on social media

He didn’t spend years playing bars or relocate to Nashville to play at clubs there before coming into the public eye.

Instead, Brown, who moved around northwest Georgia and the Chattanooga Tennessee area while growing up, started out in 2013 by getting chosen for the TV talent show “X-Factor.” only to drop out after producers wanted to put him in a boy band. Determined to be his own artist, Brown decided to post videos online of himself singing covering country songs, hoping the clips would go viral.

The strategy worked. His version of George Strait’s “Check Yes or No,” posted on Sept. 30, 2015, caught on in a big way, racking up 7 million views. A couple of weeks later, Brown, then just 22, posted a video of his original song, “Used to Love You Sober,” and saw it amass more than a million views in three hours.

Brown then used a Kickstarter campaign to finance a 2015 debut EP, ”Closer.” After “Used To Love You Sober,” was released to radio and reached No. 2 on the Country Digital Songs chart and was followed by two more singles that also had considerable success, Brown was signed by Sony/RCA.

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Sony/RCA launched Brown’s major label career with the EP, “Chapter 1,” before a full-length self-titled debut followed in December 2016.

Two initial singles from “Kane Brown,” failed to catch on at radio, but the third single, “What Ifs,” was the charm. Featuring Lauren Alaina, a friend from Brown’s school days, the song went to No. 1 on “Billboard” magazine’s Country Airplay chart. The follow-up single, “Heaven,” did even better, simultaneously topping all five of the main country charts – a first by any country artist.

Brown’s second album, 2018’s “Experiment,” became another blockbuster, spending 13 weeks atop “Billboard’s” Country Album chart, going double platinum and spawning the chart-topping country singles, “Lose It,” “Good As You” and “Homesick.”

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Now “Different Man” has kept Brown on track. It has generated three more chart-topping hits, “Like I Love Country Music,” “One Mississippi” and “Thank God.” The latter song is a largely acoustic duet with Brown’s wife of four years, Katelyn.

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This latest album went through a bit of a journey. As early as 2019, Brown said he had gotten started on the project, co-producing the project with the producer of his first two albums, Dann Huff.

At one point, Brown intended to make “Different Man” a full-on country album, a departure for an artist who has shown diverse musical influences. The son of a white mother and a father who was part African-American and part Cherokee Native American, Brown listened to country music as a boy, became more interested in hip-hop as a teen, came back to country in high school and absorbed rock and pop influences as well.

Country has been his predominant sound, but Brown has done songs that draw on his other influences as well, particularly on his 2020 EP, “Mixtape Vol. 1,” which included collaborations with John Legend, Khalid and Swae Lee.

Eventually, Brown decided to expand on the country direction of “Different Man” by including several songs that didn’t fit the country mold, including “Grand” (a hip-hop-flavored track), “See You Like I Do” (a sleek R&B/pop tune), “Riot” (a punchy rocker) and “Bury Me in Georgia” (whose thumping beat and thick guitar riffs add rock to its rustic country sound).

This fits Brown’s general approach to his album.

“When I release an album it’s just a bunch of songs,” he said. “I feel like a lot of artists, they try to make like a theme of their album. That’s not me. My album is, I write a bunch of songs I think can be singles. I don’t care what they sound like and then put an album together. But the hardest part of making my album is putting them in an order that they’ll make sense.

“I think it (“Different Man”) definitely made people realize you never know which direction I’m going to go,” Brown said. “I do like that.”

Now Brown is hitting the road and bringing out a big visual production and changing up his setlist.

“Honestly, I feel like we’ve been playing the same set list for the last two years,” he said. “So we’re working on some new music arrangements, moving songs around, adding some new songs off of the new album in there, taking some of the old cuts that weren’t number ones, taking those out, so the fans that keep coming aren’t listening (again) to those anymore. We’re just trying to make it as different as possible for the people that have been to 20 of my shows.”

Fans can expect Kane Brown to perform duets with his wife, Katelyn

Another wrinkle will be at least a couple of duets between Brown and his wife, Katelyn.

“She should be at just about every show and we’re trying to find a way to get her in more songs, whether it’s me and her doing a cover, we love singing Randy Travis and Carrie Underwood’s ‘I Told You So,’" Brown said. “I might see if we can throw that in there or something.”

In addition to the tour, Brown will have a presence on television, as he co-hosts the CMA Awards with Kelsea Ballerini on April 2, and then appears on April 7 in his first acting role as a guest star on the series, “Fire Country.” Brown had a connection with the show before he appeared on screen.

“I had been talking to Max Thieriot, which is the lead role for ‘Fire Country.’ They were using my song ‘Riot,’ off of my new album, yeah, they were using that for their theme song. So that kind of made the connection,” Brown said. “I told Max that I was trying to get into acting. So he’d been trying to figure out a way to get me in there and they finally found it. I’m so grateful for it. It was so fun.”

Once Brown wraps up his tour schedule in August, he hopes to get more acting opportunities. So far, though, nothing is booked.

“We’re just trying to dip our toes in the water,” Brown said. “Whoever calls, if it makes sense, we’ll do it.”

For tickets, go to https://www.ticketmaster.com/

This article originally appeared on Herald-Journal: Kane Brown brings his "Drunk or Dreaming" Tour to the Greenville area.