Chris Lane

Chris Lane might be the only country star who owes his career to a knee injury. Born in Kernersville, North Carolina, in 1984, he was focused on becoming a pro baseball player, but a 2004 injury while he was playing for UNC Charlotte led to multiple ACL surgeries, killing his dream. Needing to push his passions in a different direction, he picked music. But the Chris Lane who country audiences first knew as the leader of the Chris Lane Band in the late 2000s seemed quite different from the one who became a Nashville hitmaker. In his initial incarnation, Lane was a scruffy, ballcap-wearing country rocker whose hard-riffing tunes turned a few heads with the band’s 2012 album Let’s Ride. A couple of years later, having relocated to Music City, Lane reinvented himself again. Signing with Big Loud (famed for shepherding the careers of Florida Georgia Line, Morgan Wallen and others), he rebooted his sound and image. With a stylised, citified look and a modernist blend of pop, R&B and country, Lane scored big with 2015’s “Fix” and the 2016 LP Girl Problems. Produced by Big Loud partner Joey Moi, who is as renowned for his work with Nickelback as for his country credits, the album was loaded with cutting-edge, electronic-assisted production. But when Moi and Lane reconvened to make 2018’s Laps Around the Sun, they took a more organic approach, working with a live band for a more naturalistic sound that let Lane’s innate soulfulness shine on tunes like the unabashedly lovestruck ballad “I Don’t Know About You”. The tune became Lane's biggest hit to date, as country listeners embraced the mercurial singer’s more intimate vibe.