Review: Kentucky twanger Tyler Childers sells out and soars in his first Minnesota arena show

There was a big hi-fi video screen, fancy overhead stage lights, a nifty center floor B-stage and hordes of young fans dressed up like a million buckaroos at Target Center on Wednesday night.

Make no mistake, though: Tyler Childers’ first arena-headlining concert in Minnesota was still as hick as a rattlesnake-skin belt and as unfussy as a Saturday night at a rural dance hall.

What’s with this Childers fella, and why does he keep selling out every Twin Cities venue he plays?

Playing to a capacity crowd on a school night, the Kentucky singer/songwriter is now four-for-four on selling out Twin Cities shows ever since being introduced as Jack White’s opener at the Armory in 2018. Wednesday’s concert followed a sold-out show at the Armory in 2023, for which tickets were being resold at $200 a pop. Before that, he played two nights at First Avenue in 2019 right after the release of his third album, “Country Squire.”

Childers’ crowd has changed a whole lot in the interim, but he sure hasn’t. He took the stage wearing a Kentucky-emblazoned sweatshirt that looked like something your grandpa might pick off the rack at a truck stop, and he mostly played old-timey music that many older folks also would have loved.

Wednesday’s 15,000 attendees ranged from teen TikTok users and collegiate partiers to a smattering of mainstream country music fans you might also see at Keith Urban’s next show. Some of the alt-twang music heads who first caught him at First Ave were still in tow, too.

With that kind of hodgepodge, mostly urban or suburban crowd, you can imagine how weird but wonderful it was to hear everyone singing along loudly to lines like, “Daddy worked like a mule minin’ Pike County coal,” or, “I ain’t the sharpest chisel that your hands have ever held.”

Childers has stuck to the same yahoo-ish lyricism and rich, authentic, bluegrass-tinged twang that made him famous starting in 2017 with his second album, “Purgatory.” About the only way Childers has slicked up his music since then has been using more apostrophes for consonants in his song titles.

Case in point: The title track of his heavily Grammy-nominated 2023 album, “Rustin’ in the Rain,” arrived as the second song of the set — following the one song of the night that didn’t find fans singing along loudly, a barn-storming new tune about drinking problems that has yet to be released.

Some of the best-received songs in Wednesday’s two-hour performance came off Childers’ 2019 record, “Country Squire.” Those included the Buck Owens-y title track (about falling in love with a vintage RV) and the rowdy and rocked-up “Creeker” (about a country boy who “never a-dreamt all the ways that the city can bring him down”), both played early in the set.

And then there was that album’s big hit, “All Your’n,” another pro-apostrophe classic that exemplified another unchanged trait of Childers’ songwriting style: He knows how to mix in straight-ahead, heart-tugging love songs amid his more ironic and witty tunes with the kind of graceful ease of another Kentucky-rooted songwriting legend, the late John Prine.

During a deservedly long acoustic mini-set on the small B-stage, Childers left a lot of hearts on the floor as he and everyone sang out the lovelorn “Lady May.” Not long after returning to the main stage, he dropped another romantic bomb on the crowd.

“It’s cold out there, and you know some men search for ages for the love that I have found / So I will stand my ground,” Childers sang in “In Your Love,” his most recent hit, laced with elegant piano work by keyboardist Jimmy Rowland.

Sober for several years now and looking slim and clean-cut, the 33-year-old redhead sang dramatically and impeccably all night. His voice is still heavy on the warble but with softer edges nowadays, a balance especially apparent during the highlight of the acoustic montage, “Shake the Frost.”

Childers’ band has changed more than he has. The six-man unit has gotten rockier and louder, which made for extra-fiery versions of “Whitehouse Road” and “House Fire” late in the set. However, things actually got a little too loud here and there, as parts of the show suffered a poor acoustic mix.

But hey, good thing Childers is still playing with a rowdy roadhouse country band, and not turning into an over-polished arena act like Def Leppard. You could forgive him and his boys for being a little extra enthusiastic their first time playing an arena in town.