After two years of pandemic-related touring breaks, plus the stops and starts of getting back on the road, Zac Brown Band is looking ahead to better days: Their summer 2022 calendar is jam-packed with Out in the Middle Tour stops.

That means ZBB are getting the chance to showcase the songs off of The Comeback, their late 2021 album, in a live setting, frontman Zac Brown tells ABC Audio.

“We’re excited to show people what we do as a band, and excited to take this music and, you know, go out and play these songs,” he says, adding that now that fans have gotten a chance to get to know the album, performing it live will take the songs to the next level,” he says.

“[We’re] excited to go and play and get that love from the people,” Zack continues. “Have them singing these new words back to us.”

After all, The Comeback is a particularly special project for ZBB. The group went back to their early influences for it, and the album’s cover art symbolizes that shift: It’s a picture of Zac chest-deep in the water of a river near where he grew up.  “I’ve been swimming in that river since I was 10 years old,” he says.

Getting back in the same water he grew up with reminds Zac of the groundedness he felt when the band made their first major-label studio album, The Foundation.

“Being able to, you know, take it back to my roots there…and have dirt on my face — the same way we did The Foundation,” he reflects. “I feel a lot of the same way I did when we made the Foundation album.“

The Out in the Middle Tour rolls on throughout the summer, wrapping in mid-November.

Copyright © 2022, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.