WASHINGTON — With seven platinum albums, he’s one of the top-selling country artists.
This week, Travis Tritt comes to The Birchmere for two solo shows Tuesday and Wednesday.
“Our solo acoustic shows I really enjoy,” Tritt said. “It gives me an opportunity to do things a little bit differently. It’s an intimate, solo, acoustic performance, just me on a guitar, no other performers on stage. When you’re in that kind of environment as an artist, you’re really vulnerable, you’re really wide open. … It gives me an opportunity to not only share the music I’ve done over the years, but to do some songs that influenced me as a kid growing up.”
Born in Georgia in 1963, Tritt cut his debut album “Proud of the Country” (1987) before breaking onto the radio with his second album “Country Club” (1989). It featured the No. 1 hit “Help Me Hold On” and the fitting rise-to-stardom anthem “I’m Gonna Be Somebody.”
“From the very beginning, for whatever reason, my voice had a special unique quality to it,” Tritt said. “I didn’t sound like any other artist. A lot of the artists that came out around the same time — Alan Jackson, Clint Black, Vince Gill, Garth Brooks — we all came out around the same time, but yet we all sounded very different from each other. It was easy to recognize.”
His third album “It’s All About to Change” (1991) featured the Grammy-winning Marty Stuart duet “The Whiskey Ain’t Workin’,” the No. 1 hit “Anymore” and the No. 2 hit “Here’s a Quarter (Call Someone Who Cares),” which was voted by CMT as one of the Top 100 Country Songs.
“I wrote ‘Here’s a Quarter’ in about 15 minutes after I got my second set of divorce papers,” Tritt said. “She called me telling me that maybe we’re rushing into this, maybe we should think about getting back together. I sat down and thought, ‘You know what? There’s been way too much water under the bridge for that to happen.’ That’s where the line, ‘You say you were wrong and you’re feeling alone and you’re sorry, you’re lonesome and scared. You say you’d be happy if you could just come back home. Well, here’s a quarter, call someone who cares.'”
His kicked it up a notch for his fourth album “T-R-O-U-B-L-E” (1993), featuring a catchy title track that peaked at No. 13 and the No. 1 hit “Can I Trust You With My Heart.”
“The biggest thing is to be able to write songs that people hear them and think to themselves, ‘Man, this guy must be reading my mail,'” Tritt said. “If I can write a song that’s that true to personal experiences, I know that I can move myself and I can move other people.”
His fifth studio album “Ten Feet Tall and Bulletproof” (1994) saw the No. 1 hit “Foolish Pride.” He also took time for successful compilation albums, contributing to The Eagles’ tribute album “Common Thread: The Songs of the Eagles” with a hit cover of “Take It Easy” (1993), and introducing the No. 2 hit “Tell Me I Was Dreaming” on his own “Greatest Hits” (1995) album.
“I think people don’t really realize how many hits we had on the charts,” Tritt said. “When you start hearing them back to back to back, I’ve had numerous audience members come up and say, ‘Oh man, I forgot about that song. I forgot you did that song. What a great tune that is!'”
His sixth studio album “The Restless Kind” (1996) featured the No. 3 hit “More Than You’ll Ever Know,” followed by his seventh album “No More Looking Over My Shoulder” (1999). Tritt returned to the top of the charts with “Down the Road I Go” (2000), including the No. 1 hit “Best of Intentions,” No. 2 hit “Love of a Woman,” No. 8 hit “Modern Day Bonnie & Clyde” and No. 2 hit “It’s a Great Day to Be Alive.” The lattermost showed Tritt’s daily fatherly gratitude.
“My daughter was born in 1998 [and] I wanted to see what being a father was all about,” Tritt said. “I took about two years off from being on the road from 1998-2000 to just basically stay home and be a dad. I got to see her first steps, I got to hear her first words. It was really, really neat and it made me realize how important family really was. We had two more sons after that and I realized that, at the end of the day, family is going to be the most important thing.”
After four more albums — “Strong Enough” (2002), “My Honky Tonk History” (2004), “The Storm” (2007) and “The Calm After …” (2013) — Tritt has lately embraced the digital age.
“In the last year or year and a half, we’ve gone from just a handful of people on our Facebook page to 1.1 million likes,” Tritt said. “It’s consistently growing all the time, so to have that kind of opportunity in today’s modern world is really something neat, and I think it’s something that those of us who are artists can really utilize to our benefit and to the benefit of our fans.”
All these years later, he’s amazed at how many fans still recognize his decades of music.
“I consider myself to be extremely fortunate,” Tritt said. “I could have never ever imagined that it would go as far as it has. … The fact that people can still hear my music on the radio and know immediately who it is … it brings back really good memories for them. It takes them back to a different place in time. That’s the wonderful thing about music, quite frankly. … You can always remember certain events in your life by the soundtrack that was playing behind.”
