Kip Moore Talks 2024 Aus Tour, Album #6: ‘We Leave The Audience With A Euphoric Feeling’

It was just last March that Kip Moore played his shows Aussie crowds to date, co-headlining the CMC Rocks festival in Tulmur/Ipswich (alongside Morgan Wallen and Zac Brown) and filling arenas on his own in Naarm/Melbourne and Eora/Sydney. But hell hath no fury like Australian country music fans champing at the bit to see their favourite artists: y’all demanded Moore get back here as soon as humanly possible, and by gum, he heard the call – the Beer Money hitmaker will return Down Under this September, with a massive ten shows on the itinerary (including appearances at the Deni Ute Muster and Savannah In The Round).

This will be Moore’s fifth time touring Australia in the last eight years, with the stages he’s primed to take over even bigger than last year’s. So what exactly is it about his live show that keeps Aussie fans constantly starving for more? “Well,” he tells Countrytown, “I would like to hope it's because we're good at what we do! I’d like to believe we leave the audience with a euphoric feeling by the end of the show.”

Part of what sets Moore apart from a lot of his contemporaries is the fact that when he takes to the stage with his band, he does so with not a single megabyte of digital support – “Our live show is 100 percent live at all times,” he declares proudly. “We’re not just running a bunch of tracks at ya – we’re a living, breathing live band, and that means things tend to change throughout the night. My fans have the ability to dictate the show with us, because we're not strapped to a computer. We’ll add songs onto the set if we’re really feeling the juice from you guys – you know, if the whole crowd starts chanting for ‘Backseat’ then I might just play it – and I very rarely play that song. And I think the fans know that when they see one of our shows; they can feel that sense of unpredictability.”

The power of live music is such a poignant thing – Moore himself knows it as a punter, too, noting that he recently caught Hozier’s set at the Railbird festival in Lexington, Kentucky and had his mind thoroughly blown by the Irish folkster’s presence. “Live music is so special,” he says wistfully. “It takes us away from all the stuff we're battling in our heads, and all the constant fighting and bickering we do in society. When you’re in the crowd at a concert or a festival... It’s a place to dream, you know? And I feel like we as a band provide that at our shows. I've had it said to us so many times, when people are leaving the venue, that they felt like they’d just had this spiritual experience with the show – that's the best compliment you can get if you're really trying to do something that matters!”

Unsurprisingly, Moore always has the stage in mind when he’s working on new music: “I don’t necessarily go into a writing session thinking about it,” he says, “but inevitably, when I’m writing, it always creeps into my head – ‘How will this translate to the live show?’”

Even when a song isn’t specifically written for the stage, Moore’s fans will find a way to turn it into a setlist staple. He cites Guitar Man (the rousing closer to his 2017 album Slowheart) as a prime example: “I wrote that song for me. I really wasn’t thinking about whether people would want to hear it live – but all of a sudden I’d be playing a show and I’d see all these signs in the crowd asking us to play it. That was such a nice surprise for me.”

Moore’s upcoming Australian tour comes in support of his fifth studio album, Damn Love, which arrived last April – just a month after his last visit. He kept the record close to his chest back then, though, only performing the title track (which had already been released as a single). But now that most of its 13-song tracklist has been adapted for the stage, Moore is excited to showcase more of the album to his fans Down Under. He muses on the ones that gel best in the setlist: “Heart On Fire has been so much fun to play – that one has been nothing but joy. Another Night In Knoxville seems to be a fan-favourite, too, the crowds always go wild for it. Sometimes She Stays... Peace & Love... There’s quite a few that do pretty well, I would say!”

Of course, it won’t be long before Moore brings an end to the Damn Love era – at the start of our conversation, he flags that he’s gearing up to complete the recording for his as-yet-untitled sixth album: “We’re right in the home stretch,” he beams, saying he has just one session left before he ships it off for mastering.

Back in March of this year, Moore revealed that he’d wrapped up his recording contract with MCA Nashville, making him an independent artist for the first time in more than 12 years. He’s been working on LP6 without any managerial oversight, funding it entirely himself. The process, he says, has been interesting: “Sometimes I don’t even know how to process the feeling,” he admits. “It’s definitely been different…

“You know, I’ve always made the records I wanted to make – I was one of the few [artists] that had complete trust from the label to go and do whatever I wanted to do – but I do think there’s something that comes with that, when you’re attached to a major record label; there’s a subliminal, subconscious thing where you’re like, ‘Man, I hope they like what I do. I hope I give them something they can work with.’ But this time, I was completely freed from that thought process. I’ve always made the records for myself, first and foremost, but this time it was solely for me. I think that’s been the biggest the difference.”

As a result of the creative liberation Moore felt in the studio, his sixth album will be his rawest and most authentic. Giving us some insight into the process, he teases “a certain song on the record that is so powerful for me, personally,” which he goes on to describe as “an homage to where I'm from and how I grew up”. It’s the kind of song Moore could only make for this record – and it all comes down to the chorus. He explains: “I know what a hit chorus sounds like – and it’s not every day that you write a hit chorus. I think when I was writing songs in the past, when I’ve known that I had a hit chorus on my hands, I’d want to build the production around it so the song had a better chance at being a hit on the radio. But making this record, that kind of thinking went out the window.

“My only focus was to make the songs sound the way they needed to. And with this song in particular, I went down the polar opposite route from where I would have taken it [in the past]. My keys player was in the room with me when I was writing it, and he was just kind of dabbling on this real old, messed-up piano; it had this almost muffled sound, and it had some dead keys – but it also had this real beautiful, earthy thing about it, and what he was playing was so simplistic and hypnotic. I was just like, ‘Yeah, that’s what this song is! That’s what makes me feel these lyrics the most.’

“That’s the thing about songwriting – if your lyric has tension on it, naturally you’re going to try to find tension in the music; you’re trying to fit all the puzzle pieces together – and sometimes, if you’re writing a song that you know has a hit chorus, you’ll try to shove it into this space so it can be ‘palatable’ for a mass audience, so it can be a hit record. But I wasn’t thinking about that with this record. I let the music direct me: however it was that the music spoke to me in the most profound way, that’s the way I went with it.”

KIP MOORE

2024 AUSTRALIAN TOUR

WITH SPECIAL GUESTS JAMES JOHNSTON* + SONS OF THE EAST^

Saturday September 28 – Eora/Sydney, ICC Theatre*^
Sunday September 29 – Awakabal/Newcastle, Civic Theatre^
Wednesday October 2 – Kaurna/Adelaide, Hindley Street Music Hall^
Thursday October 3 – Naarm/Melbourne, Rod Laver Arena*^
Saturday October 5 – Yarkuwa/Deniliquin, Deni Ute Muster
Tuesday October 8 – Ngambri/Canberra, Canberra Theatre Centre^
Thursday October 10 – Tharawal/Thirroul, Anita’s Theatre
Saturday October 12 – Mareeba, Savannah In The Round
Sunday October 13 – Meanjin/Brisbane, Entertainment Centre*
Tuesday October 15 – Boorloo/Perth, Metro City

Tickets: frontiertouring.com