Morgan Wallen's Nashville concert toggles grand spectacle, intimate moments at Nissan Stadium

Morgan Wallen's first of three scheduled nights headlining at Nashville's Nissan Stadium felt like another in a series of inflection points in country music's ongoing pop-culture evolution.

The Billboard chart-topping artist walked out to the strains of his 2022 Lil Durk collaboration "Broadway Girls," and played COVID-19 quarantine era breakout anthems "Heartless" and "Wasted on You." Among the evening's final trio of songs, he performed his 2023-released mega-anthem "Last Night." However, the evening marked an even more symbolic occurrence for Music City's audience.

Is Morgan Wallen America's latest, greatest pop cultural referendum?

Wallen's fire, laser and light-sparkled spectacle of a stage show transformed Nissan Stadium, highlighting an array imagery and topics that help tell the story of where popular country music is today.

From a fifty-yard-long stage, the show included nods to high school and major-league sports, meemaw's front porch, R&B and rock, trap music-underpinned braggadocio and whiskey-soaked heartbreak.

According to Wallen, who sang the night's closing anthem, the "One Thing At A Time" album track "The Way I Talk," it's currently funny to lampoon how semi-inebriated Southerners from "down yonder" use "words you've never heard."

However, Wallen's fanbase has adopted a certain defiance about how "(living) the way (they) talk" will impact the world around them.

For instance, one sign in the crowd advocated that Wallen throw a chair in honor of one of the show's attendees, a reference to Wallen's recent arrest on suspicion of hurling a chair off the roof of a Lower Broadway honky-tonk. The case was due for a hearing Friday morning.

To paraphrase a Jo Dee Messina song from two decades prior, that concert patron's "give a damn is busted."

Thursday night illustrated the rabid nature of Wallen's fanbase, as a packed football stadium cheered in awestruck glee.

The evening included incendiary moments, during which fireballs were shot from structures placed throughout Nissan Stadium, blazing into the hazy and humid Nashville sky.

It felt like not just the artist but 50,000 people strong were planting a new flag in declaration of Nashville's increased influence in steering the direction of popular music. Performing alongside Wallen were artists Nate Smith and Bailey Zimmerman, with a performance from Big Loud-signed female singer-songwriter upstart Lauren Watkins.

Bailey Zimmerman's set is reflective of a larger moment in country's mainstream

Bailey Zimmerman's 60-minute set offered that the countrified pop star behind the radio and streaming anthems "Religiously" and "Rock and a Hard Place" has arrived — no, not as a superstar. Instead, he's finally at a place where he's "let go and let God," meaning that he's filled with gratitude for reaching a place of comfort with the idea that he'll never have to repair another truck or refine oil ever again.

And yes, that doesn't mean that he looks proficient at the art of balancing dead-sprinting down a stage while playing the guitars he occasionally straps to himself with anything less than teenage joy, akin to watching Michael J. Fox play Chuck Berry tunes in "Back to the Future."

Zimmerman's set also highlighted the first moment of wondering if the intersection of the modern country music industry's content-driven consumer culture and the lack of modern-era label professionals adept at developing artists alongside their repertoires were more problematic than ever before.

Currently, country's mainstream moment demands performers are adept at synergizing their art with their authentic humanity. This would be better than allowing them to walk out like so many emperors in new clothes, awkwardly engaging with the art they've created — all while having as much bemused joy with singing their songs as the tens of thousands of people singing along.

Bailey Zimmerman is also 24 and has been a professional artist for under five years. Expecting him to have the polish of a stadium headliner-to-be able to feel like he's not making banter for the sake of banter or feeling overwhelmed by the size of the moment he's being asked to embody is asking a great deal.

Considering and then positively elevating past the crossroads moment where a young man buying your merchandise or the young girl who catches the football jersey you throw into the crowd keeps those mementos forever, or they end up in an eventual vintage store haul will help.

Songs that take off like supersonic jets in the open air deserve to evolve into career-elongating hits forged by incredible joy.

Morgan Wallen, sensitive singer-songwriter

The evening's most positive takeaway is that Morgan Wallen is, at his core, as much an acoustic guitar-slinging singer-songwriter as any bearded man attempting to get nominated for an Americana Music Association award.

He walked 70 yards into the south end zone at Nissan Stadium to ascend to an intimate stage far away from a structure meant to bellow fireworks, smoke and flame like something out of Kiss' five-decade-old catalog.

Five minutes into assuming the stage, it was an easy-to-determine fact that the best pure performance of his set is still when he covers Jason Isbell's "Cover Me Up."

It's almost as if his boom arrived via soul songs and trap bangers while, as a person, he was falling in love with the idea that, when they connect, looking people in the eyes and telling tales as songs about your childhood and family has been — for many who have interacted with the art of making music during country music's century-long existence — actually the most fun thing in the world.

Wallen looking as though he's curiously poking at a piano while playing "Sand In My Boots" or physically leaning into his guitar to convey the authentic strength of the work of female songwriters via "Thought You Should Know" — a Nicolle Galyon, Miranda Lambert and Wallen co-written homage to honest, down-home conversations swaddled in a mother's knowing glare and caring love — or Jessie Jo Dillon's "Lies, Lies, Lies" (an ode to lying to one's self about a breakup's emotional impact) humanizes him beyond notoriety in a way that for many, if not yet all, in the crowd, yet, are more than endeared to.

In a night when country's mainstream expansion was caught in an awkward evolutionary moment, snapshots into Wallen's soul like these deserve a deeper, earnest revisiting via marketing dollars and radio-ready appeal once the Beyoncé, Lana Del Ray, Post Malone, and Kacey Musgraves fervor dies down.

Wallen's catalog of pop hits is undeniable

At the end of a night observing country music's current statistical kingpin, the reason why Morgan Wallen was the country's sales chart leader for half of 2023 and radio chart-topper for 33% of the year became abundantly clear.

Calling any pop hit that Wallen's had in roughly the past decade anything less than a hyper-magnetic earworm is a slap in the face to any musician, producer, songwriter, or studio engineer who has touched his work.

Zimmerman returned to the stage to perform a duet take with Wallen on what was originally his, HARDY and Florida Georgia Line's 2017 hit "Up Down." If frozen in time, the moment felt like the tandem was cosplaying as Tyler Hubbard and Bryan Kelley. ERNEST's appearance for 2023's "Cowgirls?" It felt less "FGL" and more in the vein of Wallen's Lil Durk collaboration "Broadway Girls." Thus, it highlighted how ERNEST, as a songwriter, can be a shape-shifter as comfortable in the style of Dean Dillon's timeless fiddle and steel guitar country music as he is crafting "urban" radio-leaning top-40 music.

As well, in a stadium, songs like "Whiskey Glasses," "Man Made A Bar" (notably sung on Thursday night without Eric Church present), "I Wrote The Book" and the Allman Brothers' "Midnight Rider" interpolating hit "Everything I Love" don't resonate as much as anthemic songs but rather as anthems devoted to where the peak of what defines America's countrified popular culture moving forward.

In that regard, lining up, knocking back, and filling up whiskey glasses to hide the truth feels less like a lyric and more like the law of the land.

We're potentially blinder than ever before, but we're simultaneously stumbling forth, daunted, but dared by our resolve to achieve a best, if perhaps not yet unified, vision of reality.

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Morgan Wallen's Nashville concert a grand spectacle at Nissan Stadium