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Photo: Brett Winter Lemon

In my review at roanoke.com, I only hinted at the coolness of one particular song, "Junkyard." There just wasn't any room in 12 column inches to write about what a performance Zac Brown Band gave on that number.

"This next song's going to make you want to eat a whole handful of Prozac," he said, to laughter.

Then he told a story about how he'd spent his youth holed up in his bedroom, holding a knife and thinking about how he'd like to kill his step-father. He said that the well-appointed Georgia house he grew up in was not a home. He didn't find a home until he moved into a rented trailer, after leaving that house.

But ultimately, he told the audience, "Junkyard" was about letting go of hatred.

ZBB kicked into the song, with lyrics showed that the old man was no good, a put-down artist, a violent man. "You are as sick as you are ugly," bassist John Hopkins sang, in the musical role of step-father. The lyrics were evocative, but it was a musical interlude the band took that turned me into a full-on fan of Brown and his group.

The music dropped out, leaving only Brown on his acoustic guitar and Jimmy Di Martini fiddle, playing what I was certain was a Pink Floyd "The Wall"-era instrumental. (After returning to work to write the review, I sang it to my friend and colleague, Neil Harvey, who helped me figure out that it was the prelude to that album's "Is There Anybody Out There?")

From there, the band launched into a repeating four-bar phrase of a jam -- the first four bars were in straight time, the fourth in a prog-ish 7/4.

Where else are you going to hear a country band doing that? Well-played, gentlemen.