Luke Bryan

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Luke Bryan makes country built for a crowd standing outdoors in summer: big, uncomplicated choruses, a warm and slightly gravelly voice, and arrangements that take their drive from rock and their gloss from pop. The songs are about small-town life, cheap fun and family, in roughly that order. The writing works in two registers. One is the party song, all trucks and fields and warm nights, delivered without irony and with a sentimental streak that keeps it from turning coarse. The other is the plain love song, or the one about loss, where the arrangement thins right out and the voice carries it alone. The records are polished and hook-first, and entirely unembarrassed about wanting to be sung back. Born in 1976, he grew up on a farm and spent years writing songs for other people before his own first album arrived in 2007. Doin' My Thing, Tailgates & Tanlines, Crash My Party, Kill the Lights, What Makes You Country, Born Here Live Here Die Here and Mind of a Country Boy followed, and the work has brought Entertainer of the Year honours from both of the main country awards bodies. Live, the show is paced like a party rather than a recital. The hits are spread deliberately across the night rather than front-loaded, the crowd takes most of the choruses, and the talk between songs is loose and unhurried. It is not a performance that asks for reverence. It asks you to join in. It suits anyone who wants country at its most sociable: songs made to be shouted by a large number of people at once, from a performer entirely comfortable being the reason they turned up.