Joe Nichols has a gig at the Pima County Fair

If his show here is anything like the one he performed in Florence, expect this to happen:

• He doesn’t muddy up his country music waters with hick-hop — that’s country’s version of hip-hop (think Florida George Line and Big & Rich) — but he’s not beyond taking a rap song and turning it into a country ballad. At Country Thunder, much to the delight of the audience, he twangified Sir Mix-A-Lot’s party anthem “I Like Big Butts” with all the respect he would bring covering a George Strait tear-jerker.
• Fiddle and steel guitar make regular appearances, contributing to the neo-traditional richness of a Joe Nichols show. Expect to hear him rewind his career — the setlist is sure to include his early hits “The Impossible,” “Brokenheartsville,” “I Hate the Way I Love You,” “Tequila Makes Her Clothes Fall Off” — and fast-forward to today — “Yeah,” “Y’ant it,” “Hee Haw,” “Sunny and 75” off his late 2013 CD “Crickets.”
• In Florence, he also performed a pretty terrific cover of Merle Haggard’s “Footlights”; at one point, it looked like he might be on the verge of tearing up, although it could have been the dust from people dancing in the sprawling festival grounds.

“I hope I am always able to do (traditional leaning country music) because that is truly where my soul is with music,” Nichols said in a phone interview in late March. “I’ve always been a traditional country fan and always will be … if I can keep surviving like that.”

This is also what we learned from our phone call with Nichols:

• The comeback kid: Nichols has had some bumps in his road including bouts with substance abuse that’s landed him in rehab a couple times. “I think a lot of people have given up on me probably several times. Someone on my team once said, ‘I wish they would quit quitting on you’. It kinda feels like that. I think people have used the term comeback two or three times in my career. I don’t know if I really look at it like that because I have never really gone anywhere. But I get that out of visibility is what they are getting at.”

• New smaller label, new bigger energy: “I am with a label now (Red Bow) that really cares about me as a person and cares about my future and actually has the same kind of plan and projected future for me as I’ve always wanted. For me to be with people that are like-minded and finding myself in that situation is a great situation. Because since maybe 2006 there’s been that kind of cloud a little bit over my relationship with the label that I was with ... Show Dog. Not that there was any person at fault for that, but sometimes working relationships, the chemistry is not very good. But I’ve got to say that the chemistry with this label is great.”

• No. 1 out of the box: “When we got out of the studio with the first four songs, there was one song that felt obvious to me that it belonged on radio and I felt super strong about it and that was ‘Yeah’.”

• Don’t expect to see Nichols, 38, the father of two, on any Pima County Fair rides: “Something about when you hit 28 or 30, the rides at the fairs and the festivals lose their appeal.”