Anderson East Wants a Transcendent Live Show

It is not obvious that Anderson East spent his childhood entrenched in the Baptist Church to the extent that he did: He writes secular relationship songs, drops the occasional breezy curse when chatting and has the slim-cut fashion sense of a millennial from a Southern big city.

Nevertheless, Mr. East—whose birth name is Michael Cameron Anderson—spent every Sunday morning, Sunday night and Wednesday night watching his grandfather, an Alabama preacher, deliver sermons.

“No matter how hard I try, it’s always going to be there,” Mr. East said of the impact of his upbringing on the music found on his recently released sophomore major label album, “Encore.” “I definitely have a bit of that charisma. But there’s certainly also church guilt and all the fun stuff that comes along with that shit. I don’t try to separate.”

Mr. East says that, if anywhere, the inseparable religious influence manifests itself in the album’s conceptual conceit: that every song have the gravity to be playable as an encore at a live show. He aims to cultivate a relationship with his audiences that is quasi-spiritual in nature.

“I think the whole mission for us, especially at a live performance, is try to reach that point within yourself and with the audience. Hopefully, the audience feels a kind of bigger-ness, something bigger than just the situation at hand,” he said.

That mission will come to the East End when Nashville-based Anderson East plays at the Westhampton Beach Performing Arts Center on Saturday, March 2, at 8 p.m.

“Encore” was released in January 2018. WHBPAC’s website bills its music as a “fusion of soul, rhythm & blues, gospel, early rock & roll, and a dash of country,” although Mr. East is dubious of ascribing classifications himself.

“I don’t know if I really have the proper perspective,” he said. “It’s very American music. That’s about it.”

The album’s eighth track, “All on My Mind,” a raspy Americana-pop song co-written by Ed Sheeran, among others, was nominated for Best American Roots Performance at this month’s Grammy Awards. (Brandi Carlile ultimately won for her song “The Joke.”)

“I was on the road somewhere,” Mr. East said of when he heard that he had been nominated. “I woke up and my phone had gone a little berserk. I expect the worst, but turns out I was nominated for a Grammy. Better than hearing somebody died or something like that.”

Perhaps the reason that Mr. East’s music is said to belong under the umbrella of a host of genres is his attraction to the sonically unfamiliar. This is best represented by his collaboration with Tim Bergling, the Swedish electronic music pioneer professionally known as Avicii, who died last April, on the song “Girlfriend.”

The serendipitous connection was Mr. East’s first professional foray into electronic music. Mr. Bergling was spending considerable time in Nashville. Word ran through local channels, and the two were “set up on a blind date,” as Mr. East put it.

“If anything, I’m just drawn to sounds and people that I don’t understand how they do it,” he said. “It sparks that childhood creativity in me to be a little more reckless and a little more not necessarily approaching everything so preciously.”

Mr. East moved to Nashville from Athens, Alabama, after studying audio engineering at Middle Tennessee State University. He worked as a session musician and recording engineer as he self-released music until his 2015 major label debut album, “Delilah.” Dave Cobb produced “Delilah”—the partnership continued on “Encore”—and put it out on his Low Country Sound label.

“Delilah” was well-received critically. But despite the greater artistic freedom allotted with relative success and a three-year gap between albums, Mr. East found “Encore” to be the more difficult of the two albums to make. He and his accompaniment were traveling often, so they were somewhat starved for songwriting and studio time.

Largely due to this, “Encore” coalesced around the types of musical exploration that the group was implementing in its live shows. Mr. East is known to give particular care to the live experience. A couple of songs into formulating the album, the “Encore” concept materialized and the band “took over the ethos of the concept and really ran with it from there,” he said.

“I think it was just a good bookmark in who I am, and, hopefully, the next one will be the same.”

After moving to Nashville, Mr. East shed his birth name and began performing under the name Anderson East. The differentiation allowed him the mental space to move between the mundane day-to-day and the heady reality of being a professional musician.

“Mainly, I was just tired of myself,” he said. “I needed some kind of emotional construct to say the things I wanted to say instead of having these worlds melding with the guy that’s screaming into a microphone and the guy that pays the phone bill. I know it sounds counterintuitive to go by something else, but it’s actually a more truthful version.”

Anderson East will perform on Saturday, March 2, at 8 p.m. at the Westhampton Beach Performing Arts Center. Tickets are $55 and $45. Call 631-288-1500 or visit whbpac.org.