It’s been nearly six months since Drake Bell stood on a stage, so you can bet when he performs Saturday, March 13, in the Park Place parking lot, he will be raring to go.
“It will be nice to get on stage and start performing these new songs that I released that I was supposed to go on tour for last year,” said the former Nickelodeon star (“Drake & Josh”). “This one is going to be interesting.”
Tucson is the only show on Bell’s schedule so far in 2021 and it’s his first-ever drive-in concert, where audience members will be in or near their cars.
Bell comes here with two new albums that he released last year — “Sesiones En Casa,” an acoustic album recorded from his Los Angeles home that features a cover of Juanes’s “La Camisa Negra,” and “The Lost Album,” compiled from 2010 demo tapes that Bell had thought were long gone until a friend found them boxed up in a garage.
“They were like skeletons. We had some pianos on there, some guitars, some fake drums that we put in as fake placeholders,” he said of the demos, discovered in a garage that had been involved in a flood. “Some lyrics were written, some weren’t written. It was a hodgepodge of these ideas but they never saw the light of day.”
It took a computer pro to save the discs so that the songs could be retrieved, he said during a phone call in early February.
“That really was just a bunch of great songs. It was really nice to get that finished,” said the 34-year-old Bell. “I’m really proud of that record.”
He’s also proud of “Sesiones En Casa,” born out of the need to do something, anything, musical during quarantine.
“It’s some cool me at home, trying to do something in quarantine so I made a fun acoustic record,” he said.
“Sessiones” features four songs sung in Spanish including Bell’s self-penned 2019 song “Fuego Lento” that taps into his love for Mexico and his Latin American fans.
“That was the first time that I had written something original in Spanish,” he said. “I had been doing so much stuff in Latin America and Mexico and I get back in the studio and it was like this is what I want to do ... and people just loved it.”
Bell also penned “No Perdamos Más Tiempo,” which is another crowd-pleaser when he performs in large festivals and arenas in Latin America.
“The show is really popular down there and I put out an album, ‘It’s Only Time’ (2006) and it did really well there, so I started playing a bunch of concerts and touring there and growing a fan base,” he explained. “It’s been a place where I can go play huge festivals and play to a lot of people. It’s really cool.”
At Saturday’s show, Bell also might perform his pandemic ode “Waiting for the World” in addition to songs from his five career albums and three EPs going back to his 2005 debut “Telegraph.”
“I really fly by the seat so we’ll see how it unfolds when we get there,” he joked, adding that he’s anxious to get back before a live audience.
“I went from playing every day to not playing at all. This is the longest I’ve gone not playing a show,” he said.
