Live Report: Tyler Childers makes 3Arena feel intimate with unifying show

The last time rapidly rising country star Tyler Childers played in Dublin, less than two years ago, he played at the 3Olympia Theatre. This time, he sold out the 3Arena.

Arena shows for country stars have become more common in recent years, though they tend to centre a different kind of country artist than Tyler Childers. Sometimes called “stadium country” or “bro country”, these shows are often categorized by songs with repeated imagery of cold beers, pickup trucks, and cowboy hats, and have been criticized as inauthentic. The American comedian Bo Burnham called them “songs about riding tractors” written “from the comfort of a private jet”. That kind of commercial country music has come to define the genre, relegating country musicians like Childers to “Americana”, a genre which Childers has vehemently rejected, calling it “a distraction from the issues that we are facing on a bigger level as country music singers,” and saying that he feels his genre has “become a costume”.

Childers is not “bro country”, or “stadium country”. His songs tell stories of growing up in Kentucky, about the exploitation of coal miners in Appalachia, drug abuse, and trying to find love in that context. They’re songs with a lot of nuance and detail, songs about complicated feelings and small scale contradictions. But how do you translate all that to an arena stage? It’s hard to convey melancholy with brightly flashing lights.

The 3Arena is packed. It’s brightly lit by a row of lights at the top of the stage, and by multicoloured glowing squares along the wall. Country music plays from the speakers as people talk to one another and find their seats. The stage itself is simple, but intentional. The floor is wood paneling, laid out in a checkerboard pattern. The stage is covered in guitars, keyboards, chairs, amps, a drumset, lights, a pedal steel guitar, laid out in a way that gives a feeling of cozy clutter. In the centre of the stage is a TV - the old, boxy kind, with the knobs - displaying static. The big screens on either side of the stage read “Tyler Childers’ On The Road” in that old-timey black and white font you see in the title screens of old western movies.

Tyler Childers at 3Arena on March 3rd, 2026. Copyright Peter OHanlon/www.hotpress.com

In the centre of the standing section, there’s a circular stage set up. Save for a small stool with some water on it, the stage is bare.

Then the lights dim, and a song with bayou jazz style instrumentals over a rock-like, electric-sounding drum beat comes on - something like the more experimental music that characterises Childers’ most recent album, Snipe Hunter. The big screens and the TV come to life. The screens change to show an image of a highway, the kind you might see on a poster, and then short clips, punctuated by static, of Childers performing. Then the screens show a countdown - 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 - and the band starts playing. Childers walks out onstage to cheers from the audience, and greets them as the band plays. The show has begun.

They start with “Eatin’ Big Time”, the first song from Snipe Hunter. From there, the show is comfortable roaring fun. Throughout the show, Childers’ voice soars over a warm mix of instruments. The show, centred around guitars and a drumset that goes chugging along through the night, is punctuated by melodic fiddle solos, the occasional twang of the banjo, sometimes the gospel-inflected sound of an organ - the latter particularly shines on an instrumental rendition of ‘This Little Light of Mine’ towards the end of the set. At one point, the show’s opening act, American bluegrass musician Molly Tuttle, comes in to absolutely shred an acoustic guitar solo. As each musician plays, their face, intent upon their work, is broadcast up on the big screens, so that the whole crowd can appreciate, loudly, the musicians supporting Childers.

The songs are pulled mostly from Snipe Hunter. There’s ‘Down Under’, a song that covers topics like Koala chlamydia over drums that you can feel vibrating in your feet and thumping in your chest. There’s ‘Bitin’ List’ a song about, as he put it, “weaponizing rabies” against people you “just can’t stand”, that has the whole crowd stomping, clapping, and singing along, a lovely anthem to hate that brings us all together. However, songs from Childers’ previous work also make appearances throughout the night, and are greeted by the audience with spirit each time - his song ‘All Your’n’ is particularly well-received.

Tyler Childers at 3 Arena on March 3rd, 2026. Copyright Peter OHanlon/www.hotpress.com

In between songs, Childers talks casually to the audience, joking with them and telling stories. At one point, he instructs the audience to turn to someone they’ve never met before and introduce themselves to their “new favorite person”. Near the end of the show, he thanks each of his band members individually, slyly rattling off titles and nicknames for each like a carnival barker, and, after revealing that it is the birthday of one of his keyboardists, leads the whole audience in singing ‘Happy Birthday’.

The highlight of the night comes in the middle of the show, when Childers descends from the main stage and comes back out onto the circular stage in the middle of the crowd. There, lit by a single spotlight, Childers sings ‘Lady May’, accompanied only by his guitar, his voice rising and falling, sometimes breaking with emotion, sometimes dropping to barely a whisper. Then he is joined by another guitar and a fiddle player, and sings ‘Nose On The Grindstone’, his voice a plaintive wail as he sings about his father’s warnings against drug use. He closes his performance on the centre stage with ‘Follow You to Virgie’, an ode to his friend’s grandmother. “I can see her up in Glory, I can see her through the pines”, he sings, his eyes closed.

So, as to the central question of the night: How do you put on an intimate show to 14,500 people at once? To be honest, the show does lose something of Childers’ music, just by virtue of it being performed to such a huge crowd - the focus leans more towards big, fun, country rock songs than towards Childers’ slower, more tender music. But the intimacy that is core to Childers’ music is still there, from the songs that have us all singing in unison to the songs so heavy with emotion that you can feel it in your chest - if you’re going to bring country music to an arena stage, this is the way to do it.