A 25th-anniversary tour can easily turn into a museum exhibit. The hits come out in predictable order, the deep cuts disappear, and the whole night becomes a carefully polished reminder of what a band used to be.
Blackberry Smoke took a different approach Saturday night at Capital One Hall in Tysons. Over roughly two decades’ worth of material, the Atlanta band treated its catalog less like a finished history and more like a working repertoire, pulling songs apart, folding other songs into them and moving freely between eras without much concern for which album was supposed to matter most.
That made the 25th Anniversary Tour feel considerably less nostalgic than the name suggests. Blackberry Smoke opened with “Like I Am” and “Payback’s a Bitch” before landing on the more familiar “Good One Comin’ On.” By the fifth song, “Bottom of This,” they had already moved through several corners of the catalog. “Hammer and the Nail,” from 2024’s Be Right Here, fit comfortably between older material without being treated as “the new song” or otherwise separated from everything around it. The set was not chronological and did not play like a greatest-hits countdown. These were simply songs the band still likes to play.
That attitude probably explains a good deal of Blackberry Smoke’s staying power. The group has always lived somewhere between Southern rock, country, blues and the looser instincts of a jam band, but those labels only get you so far. Onstage, Charlie Starr, guitarist Paul Jackson, bassist Richard Turner, keyboardist Brandon Still, guitarist Benji Shanks and drummer Kent Aberle played like a band with enough history behind it to know the arrangements, but enough comfort with them not to be trapped by those arrangements.
Stream Blackberry Smoke’s seminal 2012 album, The Whippoorwill, via Spotify:
That became especially clear in the middle of the show. “Sleeping Dogs” stretched well beyond its original boundaries, opening into passages of the Beatles’ “Come Together” and the blues standard “Chevrolet” before eventually finding its way back home. A couple of songs later, “Whatcha Know Good” wandered into “Stairway to Heaven.” Then “Run Away From It All” made room for John Mellencamp’s “Pink Houses.” None of those detours felt like standalone novelty covers. They were pieces of familiar music dropped into Blackberry Smoke songs almost conversationally, as if the band had been playing together long enough to follow an idea wherever it happened to lead.
That looseness is also where the current six-piece lineup earns its keep. Blackberry Smoke once revolved heavily around the dual-guitar partnership of Charlie and Paul, something Parklife DC noted when the band played Wolf Trap in 2019. Benji now gives the band a third guitar voice, but the result did not feel like three players fighting for the same patch of sonic real estate. The guitars could thicken a riff, separate into lead and rhythm roles or leave enough room for Brandon’s keyboards to come through. Rather than making the band sound busier, the added guitar gives the arrangements more places to go.
The lineup has also undergone a far more consequential change since that 2019 Wolf Trap appearance. Founding drummer Brit Turner died in 2024 after battling glioblastoma, and Kent now occupies the drum chair alongside Brit’s brother Richard on bass. There was no sense Saturday that Blackberry Smoke was trying to recreate an earlier version of itself note for note. The rhythm section remained solid and unshowy, providing the kind of foundation that allowed the guitars and keyboards to move around without the songs losing their shape. For a band whose identity was long tied to a remarkably stable lineup, that continuity without imitation matters.
The back half of the set made an equally strong case that Blackberry Smoke does not view longevity as an excuse to coast on a handful of signature songs. “Who Invented the Wheel,” written by Anthony Smith, arrived late in the main set before the band finally pulled out “One Horse Town” at No. 17. That song could have been deployed much earlier as an easy audience win, but Blackberry Smoke had already carried nearly the entire show before getting to it. “Old Scarecrow” closed the main set, again reinforcing that the band’s anniversary celebration was not built entirely around the most obvious choices.
Watch Blackberry Smoke’s official video for “One Horse Town,” performed live at The Tabernacle in Atlanta in 2018 for Homecoming: Live in Atlanta, via YouTube:
The encore made the lineage behind all of this a little more explicit. Blackberry Smoke returned with ZZ Top’s “Thunderbird,” tipping its hat toward one branch of the Southern rock family tree before ending with “Ain’t Much Left of Me.” It was an appropriate closer, not because it tied a neat bow around 25 years, but because it did the opposite. The song has long been a live centerpiece, the sort of number that can be stretched, pushed and reshaped depending on what the band feels like doing with it on a particular night.
That may be the more useful way to understand Blackberry Smoke at 25. The band certainly has a canon now. “Good One Comin’ On,” “Pretty Little Lie,” “Waiting for the Thunder,” “One Horse Town” and “Ain’t Much Left of Me” have earned their places. But Blackberry Smoke does not seem especially interested in preserving those songs exactly as they were recorded, or even in surrounding them with the same supporting cast of songs every night.
Twenty-five years in, the catalog is still being used rather than displayed. On Saturday, that distinction kept an anniversary tour from feeling like an exercise in looking backward.
Setlist
- Like I Am
- Payback’s a Bitch
- Good One Comin’ On
- Hammer and the Nail
- Bottom of This
- Living in the Song
- Let It Burn
- Pretty Little Lie
- Lonesome for a Livin’
- Waiting for the Thunder
- Sleeping Dogs / Come Together (Beatles cover) / Chevrolet (ZZ Top cover) / Sleeping Dogs
- Old Enough to Know
- Whatcha Know Good / Stairway to Heaven (Led Zeppelin cover)
- Ain’t Got the Blues
- Run Away From It All / Pink Houses (John Mellencamp cover)
- Who Invented the Wheel
- One Horse Town
- Old Scarecrow
Encore
19. Thunderbird (ZZ Top cover)
20. Ain’t Much Left of Me
Enjoy some additional photos from BlackBerry Smoke’s 25th Anniversary tour stop at Capital One Hall on September 5, 2026. All images are copyrighted by and courtesy of Ari Strauss.
