Daughtry brings the hits to Greensburg's Palace Theatre

For a brief time in 2018, it looked like the main way fans would see Chris Daughtry for the time being would be as a judge on the newly revived “American Idol.” Reports were saying he was locked in for that role on the show.

Which was news to the frontman of the band that bears his name.

“I had no idea when everyone was hearing the news or the rumors of me being a judge. That was news to me as well,” Daughtry says in a recent phone interview. “And I never got a phone call about it. I had kind of wrapped my head around the idea that would be a really fun thing to do, so I was optimistic about the opportunity. But it never happened.”

Daughtry fans, though, didn’t really lose out when Katy Perry, Lionel Richie and Luke Bryan ended up being selected as judges for the reboot season. With no “America Idol” obligations, Daughtry was able to finish work on his group’s fifth album, “Cage To Rattle,” and lock down a touring schedule that has kept the group on the road for much of the past 18 months.

“Cage To Rattle” was released on in July 2018, and Daughtry is back on the road this fall doing shows that figure to include a few of the new songs in the shows and possibly a few other surprise selections.

The band will perform Oct. 20 in Greensburg’s The Palace Theatre.

Throwing audibles

“I don’t know, we kind of want to maybe not get too married to a set list on this tour and maybe try to change it up from time to time,” Daughtry said. “Obviously, we’ll have a lot of it (set in stone) as the production kind of depends on an order and everything. So there’s going to be a good amount of structure, yet we want to have a section where we get to kind of throw in some audibles.”

With five studio albums, Daughtry, who has parlayed a fourth-place finish on season five of “American Idol” into a successful career leading the band Daughtry, has plenty of options for songs to play. His chart-topping first two albums, a 2006 self-titled debut and a 2008 follow-up, “Leave This Town,” spawned multiple singles, with “It’s Not Over,” “Home,” “What I Want,” “No Surprise” and “Life After You” among the songs that went top 10 on various singles charts.

The third album, “Break the Spell,” didn’t fare quite as well commercially, but gave the band another top 10 hit with “Crawling Back To You.”

Those first three albums featured a grunge-ish, but melodic, guitar rock sound that drew comparisons to bands like Nickelback and Creed. But then Daughtry took a left turn with the 2013 album, “Baptized.”

With that album, Daughtry shifted the group’s sound toward a more textured, more acoustic-based folk-rock sound.

The shift, Daughtry said, was partly a response to the many fans who had said they enjoyed the portion of the group’s shows where they stripped back the instrumentation and played tunes acoustically. It was also a move that at the time made sense for radio play, considering the major popularity of folk-ish acts like Mumford & Sons and the Lumineers and because of the way guitars were being replaced by synthesizers and computer-generated sounds in songs pop radio was playing.

Looking back, Daughtry thinks he may have reached some new, younger fans with “Baptized” and its popular single, “Waiting for Superman,” but it likely came at a cost.

“I think it may have turned off some of the fans that had been with us since the first record,” he said. “And we were kind of prepared for that, and hopefully they didn’t leave us for good.”

Fans of the first three albums will likely be pleased that “Cage To Rattle” brings back the guitars and the rock. But the singer/guitarist said it’s not a carbon copy of the first three albums.

More familiar

“I think it certainly is more familiar, I think, to our fans, or I think it will be than ‘Baptized,’” Daughtry said. “But at the same time, I don’t think it mirrors anything we’ve done before — in a good way. I think it’s a very nice, natural evolution of the band.

Daughtry credits the producer on the fifth album, Jacquire King, with bringing fresh dimensions to the sound of the band, which also includes guitarists Brian Craddock and Josh Steely, bassist Josh Paul, keyboardist Elvio Fernandes and drummer Brandon Maclin.

“I think production in general has changed. The way that you approach a rock song, I think, especially for the radio, is vastly different than it was when our first three albums came out,” he said. “So yeah, that certainly plays a role in the sonics of the record. But so far, I’m very much in love with this record.”