Lee Brice

These days, Lee Brice is used to being a headliner, but he knows he’ll have some new fans to try to win over when he performs Saturday for Y-Live.

During a phone interview Tuesday, Brice said he’s played a couple shows over the years with Kid Rock, who headlines the outdoor concert at Wean Foundation Park.

“He’s a beast. Every ounce of his show he gets under his fingernails,” Brice said. “I know he seems like he’s wild and crazy, which he is, but he’s brilliant about his craft. I’ll definitely have to step up my energy level.”

But Brice is sure to have plenty of fans of his own at the concert, not to mention family. His wife, Sara Reeveley, is a Poland native, and she and their three children will be at the concert as well as other family.

“I’ve definitely claimed that as another hometown,” the South Carolina native said.

In recent years, he’s headlined shows at the Covelli Centre, Youngstown Foundation Amphitheatre and Packard Music Hall, and in the early days of his career he played multiple times at Dusty Armadillo in Rootstown.

He returned to the Rootstown bar in May for a charity show.

“I popped in for an acoustic 30-minute set,” Brice said. “Getting back up on that little stage, people are piled right up against you there. I had a great time and it brought me back to those old days.”

Since those Dusty Armadillo days, Brice has had eight chart-topping country hits — “A Woman Like You,” “Hard to Love,” “I Drive Your Truck,” “I Don’t Dance,” “Rumor,” “I Hope You’re Happy Now,” “One of Them Girls” and “Memory I Don’t Mess With.”

His five albums have been certified Gold or Platinum. He’s won three ACM Awards for song / single of the year and a CMA Award for musical event of the year.

It’s been almost three years since Brice’s last album, “Hey World,” but he should have the first single out from his sixth release before the end of the year with the full album out next spring.

Brice first found success as a songwriter — Garth Brooks, Jason Aldean, Tim McGraw, Blake Shelton and Kenny Chesney are among the artists who’ve recorded tracks he wrote or co-wrote — and he has a studio both at home and on his tour bus where he can write and record.

“I’ll sift through songs on the bus, work on them and constantly fine-tune them and then I’ll take those 30, 40, 50 songs and decide which ones are going to be the ones (on the album),” he said. “That’s how I’ve been doing it the last two, three records.”

Brice said he was working on a possible tracklist for the album before the interview. He’s already pegged some of those songs for the concept he envisions for his seventh album, and the ones that don’t make either album might get shopped to other artists.

“It doesn’t mean they’re not great songs, they just might not fit on this record,” he said. “It doesn’t mean I like them any less.”

These days, making music isn’t Brice’s only career. He’s a partner in American Born Whiskey, and he’s done commercials for Yuengling beer and Bojangles restaurants, the latter with NASCAR driver Dale Earnhardt Jr.

Brice had a surprising inspiration for his outside business ventures — actor / entrepreneur Ashton Kutcher.

Brice was playing Stagecoach, the California country music festival held on the same site as Coachella, and saw Kutcher up front singing along with his songs.

They had dinner and talked about business, and Kutcher told him to figure out how much money he needed to live the lifestyle he wanted and then find investments and other ways to reach those goals without touring nonstop.

“You don’t have to play a million shows if you don’t want to,” Brice said. “I like to be home with the kids, especially at this age. I don’t like being out on the road for three weeks at a time.”

His latest venture is Selfie.Live, an app that lets fans get the photos they take at concerts digitally autographed by the performer and converted into NFTs.

Selfie.Live has partnered with athletes and other celebrities as well as musicians, Brice said.

“It’s a cool way to connect with fans.”

In the recent debate that started after Miranda Lambert admonished a group of fans for taking selfies in the middle of her concert, Brice clearly is on the side of letting the fans enjoy the show however they want, but he understands both points of view.

“I always love to watch a show through my eyes and not through a phone, and I would prefer that people do that, but they want to capture the moment and I want people to do what they want to do. I’m not going to be the one standing up and screaming the whole time because I get enthralled with the show, but take it in however you want.”