After grabbing a concert at Red Rocks Amphitheatre while in town to play a small Denver place members of the Southern rock band NEEDTOBREATHE made it their goal to earn a place on this stage one day.
They must live their dream in 2015 there as headliners of a series, flying outside relatives from South Carolina for the event, and they backed it up in the summers that followed there with three more sell-outs.
“We have like 40 or 50 loved ones when we play there, just because everyone wants to be a part of the spectacle,” stated frontman Bear Rinehart. ”I believe it’s the best place in the world. ”
With this year’s visit to Colorado, though, NEEDTOBREATHE is choosing for closeness. As part of an extended acoustic tour that’s been enthusiastically welcomed by fans more accustomed to hearing NEEDTOBREATHE play as “a fairly loud rock band,” as Rinehart put it, NEEDTOBREATHE is falling the decibel level radically for stripped-down shows at a pair of 2,000-seat concert halls: the Pikes Peak Center for the Performing Arts in Colorado Springs on Monday and the Macky Auditorium in Boulder on Tuesday.
The detour began with a couple shows in 2017 that produced a live album last November, and two acoustic tour legs were inserted.
“We were just blown away by the first 10 or 12 shows we did,” Rinehart reported this week before a show in San Luis Obispo, Calif. “Even on this tour, we reserved 35 or 40 and needed to add 15 because they sold so well. We thought, ‘Well, this will be like a niche type of market,&rsquo people that like music. It’s turned into a little bit more than that. It’s an intimate evening. We tell stories, change the setup just a bit. Fans appreciate it and have responded really well to it. ”
For the rapid-fire guitar riffs and jangling power chords emanating from Rinehart and his younger brother Bo, the group ’s lead guitar player, exquisite vocal harmonies between both Rineharts and many others in the group have long been fundamental to the NEEDTOBREATHE sound. The shows bring those harmonies to the fore in four and three parts.
“I believe rsquo & that;s the key to it,” Rinehart said. “We’ve been a bit of a group, we joke, and rsquo & that;s something that actually comes across in these acoustic shows. Also, (at a rock show) you get on a large stage with a whole lot of lights, people tend to look at one person, or whoever is on the video screen at the moment. In this circumstance, so you understand how good some of the musicians in this group are the lights are up enough to see everyone all of the time.
“There is so much production involved (in a rock show). We take three tractor trailers of all that stuff and smoke and lights, and you must hit your marks in regards to that. With this, we wanted freedom. Just be like, ‘If I don’t want to play that song, play something different,’ or ‘Let’s have a conversation, let the audience dictate more of this series. ’ “
With this tour, the group is currently playing with about 25 songs over a two-hour performance with an intermission. They up the ante, too, turning off the microphones and amps for a couple of songs.
“Some rooms just suit it so well,” Rinehart said. “Some of those theatres we’re playing, you can have a conversation with a person in the back row, just talking without a microphone, the acoustics are so good. In these cases, we try to do at least two or three, and that always is the highlight of this series. ”
Rinehart said it takes the ring back. They watched those singers move further away or closer to the mic to emphasize unique voices, and they learned from it. Those lessons influenced how this tour evolved, as did their own experimentation.
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“We were constantly in tiny venues, and a great deal of nights we would turn off the sound system and just play the tunes without radios,” Rinehart said. “I think blending together and that taught us a lot about projection. That’s helped a lot to us when we began to put this tour together. ”
Rinehart fondly remembers a show at the Bluebird a decade ago before the band hit it big. Denver seemed like a long way from home in these days.
“Denver, I think, was the place out West that embraced the group, and we could not wait to return,” Rinehart said. “When we reserved Red Rocks the time, they said if you do 5,000 tickets, which is half of Red Rocks, which is going to be a huge win. Of course, we ended up selling out it, which blew us all away. We’ve got a connection with that area. I feel like the fans have always been there for us. ”
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