Jason Aldean 2013 Tour Presents Welcomed Challenge
Jason Aldean is blazing quite a trail for his 2013 Night Train tour, already selling out three stadiums on the upcoming trek, which also features Jake Owen and Thomas Rhett. He's already announced more than two dozen dates, including sold out shows at the University of Georgia's Sanford Stadium and two sold out shows at Boston's Fenway Park.
The fact that the capacity of a stadium is huge, with so many fans far away from the stage, presents a challenge Jason takes very seriously. "That's my job, to make them pay attention to what I'm doing," he tells The Boot. "I like the challenge of doing something I'm not really used to doing, because you start to get complacent sometimes when you're the playing same thing over and over and over ... Playing a stadium is a big adrenaline boost for me and I dig it. It keeps me on my toes and makes me revamp everything I'm doing and not get stagnant with how I approach every show, which is something I like."
When it came to making the decision to include stadiums on his 2013 tour, Jason says he and his team looked at what he did this year, as far as ticket sales go. The singer sold nearly two million tickets on his 2012 trek.
"The importance of doing that shows us that we're capable of doing those things," Jason explains. "You look at nearly two million people coming to watch your show, that's a lot of people."
As far as breaking records, the "Take a Little Ride" singer says it wasn't his goal for 2012, and he didn't pay attention to it until after it started happening. "It was like, that's cool -- then the next night we did it again, alright that 's cool. By the end of the year, you've done it 40-something times. We just wanted our tour to do well and have a great year. We did the stadium show more or less as a gauge to see if we could do it, and that's why we only did it once. We sold it out way in advance, which led us into getting ready for next year."
Jason is poised to follow his monumental 2012 with an equally successful 2013. His new album, Night Train, sold more than 400,000 copies in just its first week. He tries not to compare the new music to his award-winning My Kinda Party album, insisting he's not riding any sort of crossover wave with the new music.
"Whatever happens with those songs is going to happen," he muses. "We were fortunate to have a couple crossovers -- the duet with Kelly Clarkson ('Don't You Wanna Stay') and 'Dirt Road Anthem' brought us new fans. But again, when we cut those songs, that wasn't our plan. We cut the songs because we thought they were great songs, not because we thought we'd grab some pop fans.
"All you can do is go out and represent country music the best way you can, and when you get a chance to do that make it count. On the American Music Awards, for instance, country music may get one performance in the whole show. For me, I'm hoping that whoever the performer who is representing the whole genre, is gonna go out there and kick ass, and it's going to be something that and by the end of the performance people are gonna go, 'Damn, that's country music'."