Country music star Sam Hunt will play the Alaska Airlines Center on Friday, July 14 and Saturday, July 15, 2022.
Country music singer Sam Hunt arrived in Anchorage earlier this week ahead of a pair of shows he’ll be performing at the Alaska Airlines Center on Friday and Saturday.
His family and team members wanted to make a trip to the Last Frontier from their first visit.
One of the first things Hunt did when he arrived was buy a fly rod in hopes of catching salmon.
Although he has yet to go fishing, he has been sight-seeing on long drives and hikes.
“I can get up in the morning (Friday) and try again Saturday,” Hunt said in an interview Thursday.
He said the decision to come to Alaska was based on his tour as well as his desire to see the state.
“We heard there might be an opportunity to come play and I’ve been wanting to visit Alaska for a long time,” Hunt said. “We’ve got a pretty outdoorsy crew and band, so when the opportunity came up, I thought, ‘We’re definitely going to take it.’
The tour team brought family and friends and made the trip a mini-vacation.
He said he hadn’t seen much of the country before starting his music career.
“We’ve been to all the states, so many places I never would have seen otherwise, and we just had a great time,” Hunt said.
He said it’s “really important” for him to spend more time in the places he travels to perform than earlier in his career.
“Part of the reason we came to Alaska was just to experience Alaska,” Hunt said.
[This weekend: Bear Paw Festival, country star Sam Hunt in Anchorage and more music options]
From football standout to renowned singer-songwriter
Hunt grew up in the small town of Cedartown, Georgia, where he played football, basketball and baseball. Read also : The Wisconsin Youth Symphony Orchestra has secured a new music center. Although he liked music, he never imagined himself as a musician.
“I’ve always been a big fan of music, listened to it all my life, but never tried to play, sing or create music,” Hunt said.
He got the chance to play football at the college level, and the summer before joining the Division I program at Middle Tennessee State University, Hunt decided to buy his first instrument.
“I bought a small guitar from a pawn shop and started learning songs,” Hunt said. “It turned into songwriting and I started thinking maybe I could move to Nashville and find a way to use it somewhere.”
Despite not having played an instrument before graduating high school, Hunt has become an award-winning country music star. He won several accolades for his hit song “Body Like a Back Road.” He earned an American Music Award for New Artist of the Year in 2015 and a CMT Music Award for Breakthrough Video of the Year in 2015.
But his music career almost supplanted his athletic pursuits.
After transferring to the University of Alabama at Birmingham, where he spent a couple of standout years, Hunt went on to a brief career in professional football.
Hunt was invited to the Kansas City Chiefs rookie minicamp in the spring of 2008, but didn’t make the team — and continued his music career.
“I drove to Nashville after those NFL doors closed and never looked back,” Hunt said. “Playing in the NFL wasn’t my dream. It was just a potential opportunity after college.
He said he got into the songwriting community when he moved to Nashville and wrote songs for three or four years. At first he wrote them for himself, then he started trying to get other artists to play his songs.
“It was my life for a long time, and then I consumed myself completely with music the way I had consumed myself with sports,” Hunt said.
It paid off and he had some of his work recorded by many of the country music stars he grew up listening to.
“I’ve recorded songs by Kenny Chesney, Keith Urban and Billy Currington,” Hunt said. “Reba McEntire recorded the song a few years later.”
[Hip-Hop O.G. In the 49th state, Alaska Redd is both a mic master and a mentor]
He said those opportunities put him on the radar of several record companies.
“After recording a few songs, I was able to get a record deal, make my own album, get in a van with some guys I was playing with at the time and hanging out with, and never looked back,” Hunt said.
Music has opened the way for Hunt and his team to see not only parts of the country they never imagined, but also other parts of the world.
“We’re doing a little tour in Europe,” Hunt said. “Growing up in a small town in Georgia, we didn’t travel much farther than the beach, which would have been a bay six or seven hours south of us.”
Sam Hunt with Brett Kissel
Tickets: $69, $89, $109, $149 available via venue site
