Chris Lane is in the fast lane and there's a pit stop in Prince George on Wednesday night.
The muscle car images in the video were a bit prophetic, as the hit single Fix burned rubber and made him into a
No. 1 country artist.
He's new to the Nashville scene, pushing his first album out into the world in 2012 with Let's Ride (it cracked the Top 75 on the US Country Album charts).
He moved to Music City in 2013 to get immersed in the industry. A year later he released a test single, Broken Windshield View, and the experiment worked, with the song and video catching on well with fans. That set the table for the release of a whole debut album. That happened in 2015 under the title Girl Problems, and audiences called "shotgun!" for the hard-driving-single Fix. It reached the top of the charts in August and it isn't done yet.
The album's second single, For Her, has now been launched as well, and it's another popular item on county radio right now.
It put him in one of the best dilemmas possible, on Nov. 2. He got to be in the room for the 50th Annual Country Music Awards "instead of at home on the couch eating pizza," he laughed, but he also had part of his attention on the World Series Game 7 the same night. He was hoping for the Cubs to complete the big comeback and finally get water on their 108-year drought.
If that sounds like a guy with some extra feelings about baseball, well you're not off base. It was baseball that brought him into the country music fold, in a roundabout kind of way, and it got his identical twin brother Cory into music as well. They were both athletes, not artists, growing up in Kernersville, North Carolina.
"Neither one of us played music our entire life," Lane told The Citizen during a phone call from Nashville. "I always enjoyed singing along with the radio, but I was so involved in football and baseball that that's all I did growing up. But as I got into college, and I played college baseball assuming I was going to go on to play professionally, and I got into several ACL surgical reconstructions, I realized it wasn't going to happen for me.
"I started learning how to play the guitar just because I wanted to know how to do that, and then I started to figure out how to sing and play at the same time," he explained.
"I was a big Keith Urban fan, he was the sole reason I wanted to learn, but it kind of turned into all this, and I am super thankful. My dad bought a little drum set for Christmas the following year, so once I got decent enough at the guitar, I told my brother to figure out how to play those drums and we could start a cover band. We picked up a few more guys along the way, and a couple of years into that I decided to write my own music, and it led to where we are now."
Does he miss baseball, though, even though the music thing turned into gold?
"Certainly, but given the lifestyle, I've been able to take batting practice with some professional teams, which has been a real treat for me," Lane said.
"I had one of the coaches with the Diamondbacks walk up to me after B.P. and ask 'Did you play baseball? Because we've never had an artist come out and hit the ball like that.' So I told him yeah, I played baseball my whole life."
He had a supportive system of friends and family in the hometown. When the band would do their cover gigs, they would get a solid crowd to come out and share the night. That encouragement put a lot of wind in his sails, Lane said, and played a big role in building their confidence and taking step after step towards Nashville.
The fan base grew and some of the early ones were the guys in Florida Georgia Line. When FGL went on their last Canadian tour, they brought Lane along as a warmup act. He was their bench strength, if the baseball talk can go on a bit longer.
One of the places that tour stopped was Prince George. Now that FGL is coming back to town with Lane once again on the roster, he is becomes one of the few guest artists on any major country junket who can honestly say yes, he's already been to northern B.C.'s big city.
Granger Smith is also in the bullpen, this tour, and Lane's batting average has some big hits he didn't have last time.
"The approach is still very similar," Lane said.
"I'm still going to try to keep the energy as high as possible and kick the show off in the right way, then watch FGL and Granger get up there and do their thing. I try to pick the songs that I feel like people are vibing the most, off the record."
High energy doesn't mean just pounding tempos. There will be a lot of fan desire to hear the new single For Her and all the emotion packed into that tune. It's just a standard love song on the surface, but if you've seen the video you know it has taken on a life of its own.
The Prince George fans have an invitation to Florida Georgia Line, Chris Lane and Granger Smith on Wednesday night at CN Centre.
