Q&A: Brent Cobb on adding a little more rock to his country with 'Ain't Rocked in a While,' Pittsburgh show

Country singer-songwriter Brent Cobb played a pop-up show last September at the Sheetz in McKees Rocks. And yet it wasn’t his first taste of playing an unconventional venue, and not even the first parking lot he’s played.

“You know what? No,” he said with a laugh. “Growing up where I’m from, we would have Relay for Lifes or we’d have just small-town square/festival-type deals where I grew up. I’ve played a few parking lots at convenience stores.”

Cobb and his band The Fixin’s are back in normal venues on his Ain’t Rocked in a While tour, which kicked off last week. Cobb hits Thunderbird Music Hall in Pittsburgh’s Lawrenceville neighborhood on Oct. 5, with Gold Star opening the show.

“I enjoy playing wherever they’ll have me, wherever folks will listen,” he said, “but, yeah, it’ll be nice to do a run of regular shows.”

Cobb released the rock-tinged new album “Ain’t Rocked in a While” in July, showing he’s more than the singer-songwriter known for songs like “Black Creek” and “Keep ‘Em on They Toes” — in addition to the songs he’s written for musicians like Luke Bryan (“Tailgate Blues”) and Kenny Chesney (“Don’t It”).

In a Zoom call Thursday from Minneapolis before the tour opener, Cobb spoke with TribLive about where he picked up a love of rock music, recording the album, writing songs for other musicians and more. Find a transcript of the conversation, edited for clarity and length, below.

Do you think this tour will be any different or a little bit more rocking after the release of “Ain’t Rocked in a While”?

Certainly. More than anything, well, maybe not more rocking, but I think the crowd will know what to expect. Part of why I made the “Ain’t Rocked in a While” album was to give people a point of reference to where, when they came to the shows, they were not taken by surprise when it wasn’t just a laid-back singer-songwriter style show. That’s already been a little bit evident at some of the shows that we’ve done this year. People, they know now, and it doesn’t seem to catch them off guard.

Do you feel like the new album captures the spirit of your live shows?

I think it captures the spirit of a portion of the live shows, for sure. I sort of consider my genre or whatever of music — my little lane — I call it Southern eclectic, and so I’ll say sometimes it rocks, sometimes it rolls, sometimes a little country, sometimes a little soul, but it’s all Southern and so that includes the rock side. I think we’ll get it all in there. I try to include songs throughout my 20-year catalog. I’ll do songs from my very first album all the way up until present day.

Where did you pick up the taste for hard rock?

I was born and raised in rural southwest central Georgia, about an hour south of Macon, but my mom is from Cleveland, Ohio, and her brothers were way more classic rock-heads. They were more Beatles and (Led) Zeppelin and ZZ Top and Black Sabbath and all that. So I grew up around it, at least half of me, so the foundation was already set because of that. My dad had a band with my uncle, his brother, and their whole deal was my uncle, his older brother, he would cover the classic country, like Ernest Tubb and old-school country, and then my dad though would do more of the ‘50s and ‘60s rock ‘n’ roll, like Elvis (Presley) and Chuck Berry and that sort of thing, so I grew up around it for the most part.

They passed on some musical taste to you, so how important is it for you to pass that on to your kids?

It’s been in our family for so long and generations, it’s sort of natural. They can’t help but grow up around it either. They see, and I let them know too, music has taken me all over the world and put me in such cool situations that I may have not experienced had it not been for music. So it’s definitely important to me, even if it’s not them performing music. My daughter is in dance. She does competition dancing as well as your recital dance, and she can’t help it, she’s dancing all the time. Then my son, he can mimic almost any sound, like the sound of a crow flying by, he can do it perfectly, the tone and everything. He’s playing drums now, and it’s definitely a part of their foundation as well.

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With this material, was any of it outside your comfort zone for playing or singing?

Yes, that for sure. This album was more riff-driven, and I have over the years typically approached riffs that way and the lyric melody over those riffs or under those riffs and so it did take some (time). We would lay the songs down, and then I’d have to, after we recorded and released the album even, I have definitely had to sit down and practice to sort of learn how to do it at the same time.

How different was it this time recording live to tape with your longtime touring band?

Man, it was great. You never know how those things are gonna go. Approaching music as a record and recording it is a different art form compared to playing at a live show. You never know how you’ll work in a capacity, like with this band, we play all the time together but not in that setting, so you don’t know if you’ll work as well together that way. You hope so, and it turned out that we did. The Fixin’s, most of their roots are, I wouldn’t say exclusively of rock ‘n’ roll, but they definitely lean more in that direction naturally than I may have. So when we hit record, it just kind of fell together perfectly. It was super natural.

I know that you’ve written songs for acts like Luke Bryan, Kenny Chesney and Miranda Lambert. How different is it writing for others versus writing for yourself?

I’m a little weird on that where I never sit down and intentionally write for someone else. I always am trying to just write for the song and whatever that is. Even if I have sat down and go, ‘Oh, I’m going to try to write a song that whoever could record,’ I never have success that way. The success that I’ve always had just as a songwriter and having songs recorded by others, the only success I’ve ever had is by writing the song for the song and not thinking about any of that.