FLORENCE — Brooke Eden confessed to Thursday's early afternoon Country Thunder audience: "You don't know me. I'm brand new."
And then she proceeded to perform as if she was a seasoned veteran, someone with the confidence to hold the audience's attention for a full hour and have them attempt to sing along to songs they had never heard before.
Eden, who opened Country Thunder here before a crowd that numbered several hundred and later in the day swelled to 27,000, doesn't have a record out yet; she's working on it. But she has a single, a hot rocker called "Daddy's Money" that she saved until the end. That's a trick they teach you in Country Music 101 — save your best until the end.
But Eden didn't have to convince anyone to hang with her through her 60 minutes in the spotlight. She had the audience on her side from her opening rocker "Let's Get Crazy" to her soulful, bluesy cover of Adele's "Rolling in the Deep."
She did only two covers during her show; the Adele hit and a cover of UK artist James Beck's "Hold Back the River" a nod to her experience last month playing the Country2Country Festival in England.
Instead she did something pretty daring: a whole show of songs no one had ever heard before unless they trolled YouTube and saw a few of those songs performed in radio station shots and songwriter showcase concerts.
Her music leans on the rocking side of country. Driving percussion thumps along in "Wild Heart," and Eden perfects a near growl in "Silence Speaks," her answer to the heartbreaking cheating ballad "If I Would've Known." Eden took the audience on her "Quarter Life Crisis," a pop rock gem that speaks to the indiscretions of youth, before closing her show with "Sunday Morning," telling the women in her audience "if you're going to be his Saturday night, you best be his Sunday morning." The sentiment seemed to resonate judging from the cheers from the handful of young girls who shoved straw hats into her hands as she signed autograph along the catwalk.
Next up: Songwriter Ryan Hurd is set to go on stage at 5. Stay tuned.
