Lady Antebellum kick off their Own the Night 2011 Tour in Knoxville, Tennessee on Friday night (November 11th). The 21-city trek features Charles’ brother Josh Kelley, as well as a combination of Eden’s Edge and Randy Montana in the opening slot. “We’ve been looking forward to launching this tour for years and putting together our first arena headlining tour. We’ve been opening up and sitting side stage watching Kenny Chesney and Tim McGraw, all these guys, tour, so this is our first chance,” says Dave. “So, this is kind of our first shot at letting all these dreams culminate and come together, and couldn’t think of a better way to kick it off than ending this year after the CMAs doing it.”
The band, who picked up their third CMA Vocal Group of the Year award this week, is poised to hit the top of the country charts with their latest hit single, “We Owned the Night.”
AUDIO: Lady Antebellum’s Dave Haywood talks about launching the group’s arena tour, Own the Night 2011.
Lady A (launching arena tour) OC: …doing it. :30
“Well, we’ve been looking forward to launching this tour for years and putting together our first arena headlining tour. We’ve been opening up and sitting side stage watching Kenny Chesney and Tim McGraw, all these guys, tour, so this is our first chance. We’ve actually been building, working with a designer to build the stage, and video screens and stairs and elevator lifts and just fun stuff that we’ve always dreamt of doing. So, this is kind of our first shot at letting all these dreams culminate and come together, and couldn’t think of a better way to kick it off than ending this year after the CMAs doing it.”
AUDIO: Lady A’s Dave Haywood and Hillary Scott talk about the group’s ever-evolving live show.
Lady A (show evolves) OC: …a vacation. :55
DH “Our show has kind of been evolving, hopefully naturally. I don’t want to say we don’t enjoy and love playing intimate places, that’s the way we write anyway, just sitting around acoustic. I think everybody dreams of playing there songs in a big arena where thousands of people are there. We at least write with that in mind, whether or not it’s always going to happen in that way. I feel like we try to make our show bigger for some of these fairs and festivals, because some of these things are just giant fields literally, of fifteen or twenty thousand people and there are obviously twenty other artists on the bill that day. But we will try to build it and try to sculpt an entire body of work that kind of goes through a process. I think for us, we have our stuff that we play, and I don’t know if we change it necessarily. (HS) “We took a lot of notes from playing with Tim McGraw and Kenny Chesney. Being on tour with them, especially Chesney, he just sends people on a vacation.”