Allie Colleen wants the audience members at her live performance to leave their expectations at the door.
She isn’t the type to smash her guitar or wear a cowboy hat. Her dad, Garth Brooks, might do that during his sold-out concerts, but Colleen is using her music to tell stories, connecting with her audience on a much more intimate level.
“People expect me to show up in a bus, I don’t have one,” she said. “I think a lot of them expect me to come out and know what I’m doing, which was your first problem, because I don’t. My family has never talked about music. We’re all about sports.”
Colleen, who has dropped her family name as a performer, will appear at the Outlaw Saloon in Cheyenne alongside country singer Carter Winter for a concert between from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. on Tuesday, July 27. Tickets for the show are $15 and all proceeds going toward two charities.
The concert is family-friendly and other activities will include face painting and roping and bucking contests.
Colleen said that she and Winter are storytellers, so they will spend an hour going back and forth, sharing tales of their lives and the road and playing acoustic songs. They will also perform a duet the two recorded that will be released in early August, “Love Like I Drink.”
“We’re so appreciative to be in a genre where we get to tell stories and we love that vein of country music,” she said.
While this won’t be a typical concert for either Winter or Colleen, the latter will be selling her debut album, which was released in April.
While it may seem unsurprising that the daughter of one of the biggest country music artists in history leaned toward that genre, Colleen said country music continues to evolve all the time, which appeals to her. Two of her biggest influences are country singers Jo Dee Messina and Ashley McBryde.
“I love the storytelling aspect of country music, where we get to have a voice about stuff that’s much bigger than we are,” she said. “Country’s kind of absorbing all these genres, sucking in all these little elements. But the one thing that’s never gone away is our ability to speak about the things we care about.”
She hopes to especially drive home the message to young women that they shouldn’t care about what other people think.
“We’re really pushing for females to see that we are so smart, so creative and we think about things differently,” Colleen said. “If females can sing about the things we want, it’ll really change the songwriting market.”
