Country

In recent weeks, Sugarland‘s Kristian Bush went on a nostalgia trip, attending concerts that featured U2, The Dead, The English Beat and Adam Ant.
But that run of shows was more than just a personal stroll down memory lane. Bush engaged in some professional research, too, anticipating Sugarland’s 18-date concert run on Little Big Town‘sTake Me Home Tour, beginning Oct. 24 in Greenville, S.C.

“I’m trying to educate myself in nostalgia and what it makes me feel like as a fan,” Bush says. “I’m starting to get my feet in the actual mud and dirt of what it’s like as the artist.”

Transitioning from hit-maker to nostalgia act is likely the hardest segue most artists make during their careers. It’s a difficult rite of passage akin to losing a parent — few want to experience it, but almost every performer does. 

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Complicating the process, the beginning of that change in career path isn’t clear at the outset. Terri Clark remembers a five-year period when she struggled to understand what was happening, unintentionally quoting from her own “Poor Poor Pitiful Me.”

“There’s a lot of ‘woe is me,’ I think, for a while,” she says. “You feel like you’re getting forgotten, like what you did didn’t matter.” 

Of course, it did matter. But once the transition to legacy act starts, the way in which it matters shifts. Instead of having current songs played in hot rotations, the artist’s new material sags in consumption while the old music remains as gold material or in nostalgic playlists. Fans still come to the concerts, but they’re there primarily to hear what Garth Brooks calls “the old stuff.” The new stuff tends to generate the weakest response.

“People want old clothes from a new shop,” Bush suggests metaphorically. “They don’t want new music from their old band, but they want a new show from them.”

Navigating that shift challenges an artist’s self-confidence and sense of purpose. The longer they were on top and the more successful they were during that window, the harder it’s likely to be for them to make the transition. Some eventually learn to appreciate the time they spent in the top 10 as an uncommon privilege and see their past hits as an asset they can use going forward. Others never fully accept the change in stature. 

“I remember working shows with [Merle] Haggard and Waylon [Jennings], and those guys,” Tracy Lawrence says. “They were pissed at us, you know. They blamed us because they had been dominant on the radio for years. And then all of a sudden, this young country wave comes along and they’re not getting airplay anymore. They were not happy about it, and they kind of blamed us a little bit for it. The only one that I remember not doing that was [George] Jones. You know, George embraced it. He did ‘[I Don’t Need Your] Rockin’ Chair’ and had all of us go out and tour with him and all these things. It was just a completely different experience. And that really stuck with me because I realized that we’re all going to go through this cycle.”

The phenomenon was lampooned in John Anderson‘s 1982 single “Would You Catch a Falling Star,” in which an artist’s crowds and transportation have all been downsized. “Nobody loves you when you’re down,” the Bobby Braddock-penned classic suggests as the legacy-act character struggles to revive a moment that’s no longer accessible. The audience in that song has determined the performer’s peak commercial period has passed, even if the artist hasn’t yet recognized it.

“At what point do you decide you’re nostalgia and what point did the outside world decide you’re nostalgia?” Bush asks. “There’s an internal meter and there’s an external meter, and pain [is] involved in the distance between when the two hit.”

The system sets artists up for that kind of downfall. The music industry succeeds by making stars, and it pampers and appeases them while they’re hot. It’s good for the executives’ short-term access to power, but it’s bad for the artists’ long-term mental health. In the most glaring example, Elvis Presley was famously buffered from the public by management and by his entourage, known as the Memphis Mafia, but was ultimately destroyed by his own success.

“When you’re in the middle of it, the ego gets in the way, and there’s all these people around you that are in that inner circle that protect you from the world and let you get away with stuff that normal people don’t get away with,” Lawrence says. “It’s really hard to have a good, honest perspective when you get wrapped up in it because you just get kind of carried away with yourself. Coming out on the other side, everybody doesn’t make it back out.”

Lawrence, Clark and Bush have all turned the corner. If they were uncomfortable being classified as legacy acts, they would not have consented to interviews on the subject.

Bush has made a point of asking nostalgia acts he knows in pop and rock about their experiences with the change. One of them told him that after accepting the transition, his professional life was awesome: He has a loyal core audience, knows what his fans will accept and regularly sees happy faces in the crowd. The legacy acts who deny their position, he added, are simply miserable.

Lawrence and Clark, after adjusting to the shift in their careers, were able to parlay their expertise into hosting roles with network gold shows. Both are currently nominated in the Country Music Association’s Broadcast Awards for weekly national personality of the year, for Silverfish Media’s Honky Tonkin’ With Tracy Lawrence and Westwood One’s Country Gold With Terri Clark. She ended her tenure with the show in early September; Lawrence told Billboard exclusively that he intends to wrap his Honky Tonkin’ affiliation in the next year.

Lawrence and Clark both addressed the transition musically. He tackled it in “Price of Fame,” a 2020 collaboration with Eddie Montgomery that Lawrence wrote with 3 Doors Down lead vocalist Brad Arnold. Clark embraced it through this year’s Take Two, a project that reframes her past hits as duets with the likes of Cody Johnson, Lainey Wilson and Ashley McBryde, whose appreciation for Clark underscored the significance of becoming a legacy act. Trisha Yearwood had told Clark that when artists realize it’s time to stop competing with younger acts and begin to serve as mentors, life becomes easier. McBryde, in the early stages of her national career, was possibly the first artist to tell Clark that her music had been an influence. Take Two strengthened that message.

“Not only do you embrace where you’re at, you get all that affirmation and form new friendships with some of the younger artists that you influenced when they were growing up,” Clark says. “That, to me, is a full-circle recognition of it’s about a body of work, and your lifetime of your work is not just about five or 10 years. It’s about the whole journey.”

As it turns out, the journey can actually be more satisfying after the hits stop coming.

“I’m much calmer than I used to be,” Lawrence says. “I don’t need as much validation as I used to.”

As a legacy act, the former stress of trying to find and continuously market new hits gives way to feeding the existing fan base, which can become more of a community. Whether those fans are coming to relive past glories or to simply revel in music they appreciate, they’re typically a supportive audience. Entertaining them becomes a different experience once the artist accepts that their legacy is enough.

“They relate to certain events and milestones in their own life with one of your songs, and you really have to stay in that place with it and not make it about you,” Clark says. “Make it about them. That’s when it’s not hard for me to sing these songs, when I see how excited people get.” 

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