National pop star Sam Hunt plays at the Alaska Air Force on Friday, July 14 and Saturday, July 15, 2022.
Country singer Sam Hunt arrived in Anchorage earlier this week ahead of two performances at the Alaska International Airport on Friday and Saturday.
His family and flight attendants wanted to travel from their first visit to the End.
One of the first things Hunt did with his arrival was to buy a fishing rod with the hope of fishing.
While he hasn’t gone fishing yet, he has been taking sights by long walks and walks.
“I can get up in the morning (Friday) and try again on Saturday,” Hunt said in an interview Thursday.
He said the decision to go to Alaska followed his tour and his desire to see the state.
“We got the news that there will be an opportunity to come and play, and I want to visit Alaska for a long time,” Hunt said. “We have good flight attendants and a bandage on the outside, so when the opportunity came, I was like, ‘We’re going to enjoy that completely.’
The tour staff brought relatives and friends with them and took a short break from the trip.
He says he has never seen much of the country before he started his music career.
“We’ve visited every state, a lot of places I’ve never seen, and I just really enjoy it,” Hunt said.
He says he “really makes sense” of spending more time in places he travels for acting than he did in the past in his career.
“Part of the reason we came to Alaska was just to face Alaska,” Hunt said.
[This weekend: Bear Paw Festival, star Sam Hunt at Anchorage and many other music options]
From football standout to renowned singer-songwriter
Hunt grew up in the small town of Cedartown, Georgia, where he played soccer, basketball and basketball. Although he enjoyed music, he never thought of himself as a musician.
“I’ve been a big fan of music, I’ve listened to it all my life, but I’ve never tried to play or sing or create music,” Hunt said.
He was able to play football at the college level, and the summer before he was going to commit to the Middle Tennessee State University Service Program, Hunt decided to buy his first gear.
“I bought a thrift store guitar and started learning some songs,” Hunt said. “That kind of transitioned into writing songs, and I started to like the idea, maybe I could move to Nashville and find a way to put it to use somewhere else.”
Although he never played an instrument until he was out of high school, Hunt went on to become an award-winning country music star. He won several awards for his song “Body Like a Backroad.” He won the American Music Award for New Artist of the Year in 2015 and received the CMT Music Award for Breakthrough Video of the Year in 2015 as well.
But his musical career has almost been replaced by athletics.
After transferring to the University of Alabama at Birmingham, where he enjoyed a few standout years, Hunt briefly pursued a career in football.
Hunt was invited to the Kansas City Chiefs rookie minicamp in the spring of 2008, but did not make the team – and continued to pursue his music career.
“I flew to Nashville after the NFL doors closed and I never looked back,” Hunt said. “It wasn’t really my dream to play in the NFL. It was just another opportunity after college.”
He said he fell into the songwriting community when he moved to Nashville and wrote songs for three or four years. At first he was writing them himself, then he started trying to get other musicians to play his songs.
“That was life for me for a long time, and I consumed myself with music as much as I consumed myself with sports,” Hunt said.
That paid off, and he had many of the country’s rising stars listen to some of his works written.
“I have songs written by Kenny Chesney, Keith Urban and Billy Currington,” Hunt said. “Reba McEntire wrote a song a few years later.”
[A hip-hop O.G. in the 49th state, Alaska Redd is both a professional mic and a consultant]
He said those opportunities have put him on the radar of many recordings.
“After I got some songs, I was able to make a record deal, I made an album of my own, I got in the car with some of the people I was playing with and hung out with at the time and I never looked back,” Hunt said. said.
Music opens the way for Hunt and his staff to not only see parts of the country they never thought they would see, but also other parts of the world.
“We’re doing a little bit of tourism in Europe,” Hunt said. “Growing up in a small town in Georgia, we didn’t travel much longer than the beach, which would be the Gulf six or seven hours south of us.”
Sam Hunt with Brett Kissel
Tickets: $ 69, $ 89, $ 109, $ 149 available through the venue
