{"id":103559,"date":"2024-10-02T12:07:24","date_gmt":"2024-10-02T16:07:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.cyberlego.com\/web\/2024\/10\/02\/inside-the-transition-from-now-to-nostalgia-act-that-few-artists-want-but-nearly-all-must-face-2\/"},"modified":"2024-10-02T12:07:24","modified_gmt":"2024-10-02T16:07:24","slug":"inside-the-transition-from-now-to-nostalgia-act-that-few-artists-want-but-nearly-all-must-face-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cyberlego.com\/web\/2024\/10\/02\/inside-the-transition-from-now-to-nostalgia-act-that-few-artists-want-but-nearly-all-must-face-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Inside the Transition From \u2018Now\u2019 to Nostalgia Act That Few Artists Want, But Nearly All Must\u00a0Face"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\n\tIn recent weeks, Sugarland<\/strong>\u2018s Kristian Bush<\/strong> went on a nostalgia trip, attending concerts that featured U2<\/strong>, The Dead<\/strong>, The English Beat<\/strong> and Adam Ant<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut that run of shows was more than just a personal stroll down memory lane. Bush engaged in some professional research, too, anticipating Sugarland\u2019s 18-date concert run on Little Big Town<\/strong>\u2018sTake Me Home Tour, beginning Oct.\u00a024 in Greenville, S.C.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI\u2019m trying to educate myself in nostalgia and what it makes me feel like as a fan,\u201d Bush says. \u201cI\u2019m starting to get my feet in the actual mud and dirt of what it\u2019s like as the artist.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\n\tTransitioning from hit-maker to nostalgia act is likely the hardest segue most artists make during their careers. It\u2019s a difficult rite of passage akin to losing a parent \u2014 few want to experience it, but almost every performer does.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tComplicating the process, the beginning of that change in career path isn\u2019t clear at the outset. Terri Clark<\/strong> remembers a five-year period when she struggled to understand what was happening, unintentionally quoting from her own \u201cPoor Poor Pitiful Me.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThere\u2019s a lot of \u2018woe is me,\u2019 I think, for a while,\u201d she says. \u201cYou feel like you\u2019re getting forgotten, like what you did didn\u2019t matter.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tOf course, it did matter. But once the transition to legacy act starts, the way in which it matters shifts. Instead of having current songs played in hot rotations, the artist\u2019s new material sags in consumption while the old music remains as gold material or in nostalgic playlists. Fans still come to the concerts, but they\u2019re there primarily to hear what Garth Brooks<\/strong> calls \u201cthe old stuff.\u201d The new stuff tends to generate the weakest response.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cPeople want old clothes from a new shop,\u201d Bush suggests metaphorically. \u201cThey don\u2019t want new music from their old band, but they want a new show from them.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\n\tNavigating that shift challenges an artist\u2019s self-confidence and sense of purpose. The longer they were on top and the more successful they were during that window, the harder it\u2019s likely to be for them to make the transition. Some eventually learn to appreciate the time they spent in the top\u00a010 as an uncommon privilege and see their past hits as an asset they can use going forward. Others never fully accept the change in stature.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI remember working shows with [Merle<\/strong>] Haggard<\/strong> and Waylon<\/strong> [Jennings<\/strong>], and those guys,\u201d Tracy Lawrence <\/strong>says. \u201cThey were pissed at us, you know. They blamed us because they had been dominant on the radio for years. And then all of a sudden, this young country wave comes along and they\u2019re not getting airplay anymore. They were not happy about it, and they kind of blamed us a little bit for it. The only one that I remember not doing that was [George<\/strong>] Jones<\/strong>. You know, George embraced it. He did \u2018[I Don\u2019t Need Your] Rockin\u2019 Chair\u2019 and had all of us go out and tour with him and all these things. It was just a completely different experience. And that really stuck with me because I realized that we\u2019re all going to go through this cycle.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe phenomenon was lampooned in John Anderson<\/strong>\u2018s 1982 single \u201cWould You Catch a Falling Star,\u201d in which an artist\u2019s crowds and transportation have all been downsized. \u201cNobody loves you when you\u2019re down,\u201d the Bobby Braddock<\/strong>-penned classic suggests as the legacy-act character struggles to revive a moment that\u2019s no longer accessible. The audience in that song has determined the performer\u2019s peak commercial period has passed, even if the artist hasn\u2019t yet recognized it.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cAt what point do you decide you\u2019re nostalgia and what point did the outside world decide you\u2019re nostalgia?\u201d Bush asks. \u201cThere\u2019s an internal meter and there\u2019s an external meter, and pain [is] involved in the distance between when the two hit.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\n\tThe system sets artists up for that kind of downfall. The music industry succeeds by making stars, and it pampers and appeases them while they\u2019re hot. It\u2019s good for the executives\u2019 short-term access to power, but it\u2019s bad for the artists\u2019 long-term mental health. In the most glaring example, Elvis Presley<\/strong> was famously buffered from the public by management and by his entourage, known as the Memphis Mafia, but was ultimately destroyed by his own success.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWhen you\u2019re in the middle of it, the ego gets in the way, and there\u2019s all these people around you that are in that inner circle that protect you from the world and let you get away with stuff that normal people don\u2019t get away with,\u201d Lawrence says. \u201cIt\u2019s really hard to have a good, honest perspective when you get wrapped up in it because you just get kind of carried away with yourself. Coming out on the other side, everybody doesn\u2019t make it back out.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tLawrence, Clark and Bush have all turned the corner. If they were uncomfortable being classified as legacy acts, they would not have consented to interviews on the subject.<\/p>\n

\n\tBush has made a point of asking nostalgia acts he knows in pop and rock about their experiences with the change. One of them told him that after accepting the transition, his professional life was awesome: He has a loyal core audience, knows what his fans will accept and regularly sees happy faces in the crowd. The legacy acts who deny their position, he added, are simply miserable.<\/p>\n

\n\tLawrence and Clark, after adjusting to the shift in their careers, were able to parlay their expertise into hosting roles with network gold shows. Both are currently nominated in the Country Music Association\u2019s Broadcast Awards for weekly national personality of the year, for Silverfish Media\u2019s Honky Tonkin\u2019 With Tracy Lawrence<\/em> and Westwood One\u2019s Country Gold With Terri Clark<\/em>. She ended her tenure with the show in early September; Lawrence told Billboard<\/em> exclusively that he intends to wrap his Honky Tonkin\u2019<\/em> affiliation in the next year.<\/p>\n

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\n\tLawrence and Clark both addressed the transition musically. He tackled it in \u201cPrice of Fame,\u201d a 2020 collaboration with Eddie Montgomery<\/strong> that Lawrence wrote with 3\u00a0Doors Down<\/strong> lead vocalist Brad Arnold<\/strong>. Clark embraced it through this year\u2019s Take Two<\/em>, a project that reframes her past hits as duets with the likes of Cody Johnson<\/strong>, Lainey Wilson<\/strong> and Ashley McBryde<\/strong>, whose appreciation for Clark underscored the significance of becoming a legacy act. Trisha Yearwood<\/strong> had told Clark that when artists realize it\u2019s time to stop competing with younger acts and begin to serve as mentors, life becomes easier. McBryde, in the early stages of her national career, was possibly the first artist to tell Clark that her music had been an influence. Take Two<\/em> strengthened that message.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cNot only do you embrace where you\u2019re at, you get all that affirmation and form new friendships with some of the younger artists that you influenced when they were growing up,\u201d Clark says. \u201cThat, to me, is a full-circle recognition of it\u2019s about a body of work, and your lifetime of your work is not just about five or 10 years. It\u2019s about the whole journey.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAs it turns out, the journey can actually be more satisfying after the hits stop coming.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI\u2019m much calmer than I used to be,\u201d Lawrence says. \u201cI don\u2019t need as much validation as I used to.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAs a legacy act, the former stress of trying to find and continuously market new hits gives way to feeding the existing fan base, which can become more of a community. Whether those fans are coming to relive past glories or to simply revel in music they appreciate, they\u2019re typically a supportive audience. Entertaining them becomes a different experience once the artist accepts that their legacy is enough.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThey relate to certain events and milestones in their own life with one of your songs, and you really have to stay in that place with it and not make it about you,\u201d Clark says. \u201cMake it about them. That\u2019s when it\u2019s not hard for me to sing these songs, when I see how excited people get.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tSubscribe to\u00a0Billboard Country Update<\/a>, the industry\u2019s must-have source for news, charts, analysis and features.\u00a0Sign up for free delivery<\/a>\u00a0every weekend.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Aller \u00e0 la source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In recent weeks, Sugarland\u2018s Kristian Bush went on a nostalgia trip, attending concerts that featured U2, The Dead, The English Beat and Adam Ant. But that run of shows was more than just a personal stroll down memory lane. Bush engaged in some professional research, too, anticipating Sugarland\u2019s 18-date concert run on Little Big Town\u2018sTake […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-103559","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-musique","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cyberlego.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103559","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cyberlego.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cyberlego.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cyberlego.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cyberlego.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=103559"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.cyberlego.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103559\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cyberlego.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=103559"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cyberlego.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=103559"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cyberlego.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=103559"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}