98 Country Listener Review – Miranda Lambert, Chris Young, Jerrod Niemann Concert

Miranda Lambert brought her On Fire Tour to Target Center on Friday night. Miranda said in a Facebook post that "Minneapolis Rocked @$$!" One of our great 98 Country Listeners went to the show and offers her opinions on how the show went.

Gail has been listening to 98 Country for several years now and calls and emails quite frequently. When I found out she was attending the Miranda Lambert concert, I asked if she would be willing to share her thoughts on the show since none of us were able to attend.

Gail is a HUGE Miranda Lambert fan - requests her songs all the time, buys her CDs and has seen her several times. But from her review, she was disappointed with the song selection. Here's Gail's review of the On Fire Tour.

The first thing I will say is that if you are a guy looking for girls, go to a Miranda Lambert concert as it was mostly women! I went to the show with my two friends and our night started out great! We stopped at a bar for some drinks before the show and Jerrod Niemann made an appearance at that bar before the show. We got to chat with him for a few minutes and get our pictures taken! He was very cool and a really nice guy! Then it was off to the show.

We had gotten meet and greet passes for Chris Young through his fan club, so we lined up for that meeting. He is even better looking in person if that is even possible! Chris was so sweet and seemed very happy to meet his fans! After the meet and greet it was off to our seats to see Jerrod Niemann open the show. I thought he was good! He’s got a great voice and he sings a lot of catchy, fun, drinking songs which seemed to get the crowd ready for the night. We all liked him a lot.

Next up was Chris Young. He was AWESOME! He came out guns blazing with more energy than I’ve seen anyone have in a long time! He never stopped smiling and you could tell that he was having a blast up there and that he genuinely loves what he does. He worked the crowd well and sang all 5 of his number 1 hits. He was by far, the highlight of the night!

Next up was Miss Miranda. Let me start out by saying I am a HUGE Miranda Lambert fan. I have seen her five times before Friday night and I love her! I know what kind of show she is capable of putting on and I was so excited to see her headline. Unfortunately, I was very disappointed with her performance. She looked gorgeous and sounded great. But she was missing that energy and spark that I’ve seen before. I felt like I was on a rollercoaster ride throughout the show.

She opened the show with two upbeat songs including Kerosene, so I thought it was going to be great! But then she lost me. Personally, I didn’t like her song selection, she sang too many cover songs - five to be exact - and she didn’t really work the stage or ever get the crowd pumped up, except for when she sang Gunpowder and Lead.  I felt like she was just there to do her job and she was more concerned with what she was wearing than putting on a great show.

I came to see her perform her songs, not a bunch of cover songs! If you want to do that, then play longer and do the songs people came to see you do. For her encore she came out and sang an acoustic version of a Merle Haggard song that I didn’t know. Yeah it was cool, but it kind of put us all to sleep. Then she brought Jerrod and Chris back on stage and I thought, “Oh this is going to be great!” Wrong.  They simply sang King of the Road and that was it. That’s how the show ended. It was kind of lame if you ask me. I wanted to leave there being pumped and wanting to see her again and sadly, that’s not the case this time.

I would like to thank Gail for sharing her fan experience from Friday night. I would like to jump in and say that for an artist like Miranda, it is difficult to fill 90 minutes of hits. She doesn't have 90 minutes worth of hits under her belt like Kenny Chesney or Tim McGraw. I'm glad that she's able to go out and headline a tour this early in her career. Most of the time it takes years to build up enough material to be able to carry a ninety minute performance.

When young artists headline shows, they do tend to bring in cover songs to help with the familiar factor with the audience. Once the hits are played, the audience might not be familiar with the rest of the songs in an artists' library.

What do you think? Were you at the show? Do you agree with Gail? Leave your comments below.