Easton Corbin has a vivid memory of the last time he was in Tucson.
“I remember being the hottest I’ve been in my life,” he recalled of that 2018 visit. “I was on a motorcycle in Tucson, caught up between red lights. There were two miles of red lights and I hit every red light there was. I had to stop and get water, I was dehydrated.”
The temperatures won’t be any cooler when he steps on the stage at Desert Diamond Casino on Friday, June 30, for his first concert here since that 2018 DDC show.
“I would rather have the heat than the cold,” he was quick to note.
Corbin comes here with his months-old album “Let’s Do Country Right,” his debut on the startup country label Stone Country Records and his first full-length album since 2015’s “About to Get Real.”
The album brings him full-circle to the neo-trad country roots that he introduced back in 2010 with his eponymous Mercury Records debut. In his twangy rich baritone that fans early on compared to George Strait, Corbin leans more heavily into the style that brought him to the dance, rooted in stories about marrying the girl (“I’m gonna change her name but she don’t know it yet/She’s what I’ve been praying someday God would send”) and being from a long line of “Lonesome Drinkers.”
He pays homage to Merle Haggard in “Hey Merle” (“Yeah, you made ‘em go, ‘Ooh, ooh, ooh’ when you’d sing them songs”) and doles out advice to “drink a little ice-cold beer, have a little fun in here” in the title song before taking a stroll back to the time when he took a shiner defending a girl.
In between the heartbreak songs of losing the girl (“When you open your eyes/And that pretty little mind has a memory in it/I hope there’s still a little me in it”) and trying to replace the girl of your dreams (“Where do you go from a girl like her”), Corbin has a little fun with the rollicking “Wind You Up” and the blue-collar anthem of “Honky Tonk Land.”
“For me, it’s about keeping one foot traditional and one foot modern,” Corbin said of his approach to country music. “Country has become such a wide genre and just when you think it can’t get any wider, it becomes even wider. I always hope and pray that there will always be a place for traditional country music, and that’s what I do. … Nobody really does what I do out there.”
This is Corbin’s fourth career album — and the first one where he wrote most of the songs — but it feels as fresh and new as his first.
“That’s exactly what I was going for,” he said during a phone interview early this month. “They say that you have your whole life to write for your first record. After I separated from Mercury (in 2018) … it was like having your whole life to write for this record. I just wanted to get back in my roots and where I started and just take our time and write songs we loved. And if we loved it, great, and if we didn’t, go out and write another one.”
Corbin said he will play four or five tracks off the new album in between his early hits including the chart-toppers “A Little More Country Than That” and “Roll With It” off his first album.
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