Lakeview to open for Staind, Daughtry, Breaking Benjamin

GILFORD — A Nashville band hot off the release of their self-titled debut album is set to open for Daughtry, Staind and Breaking Benjamin at BankNH Pavilion Wednesday night, performing their unique fusion of country western and rock 'n' roll music for the masses.

Lakeview, aptly named for the venue, combines hard rock and metal with country sounds to create a unique variety of boot-stomping music — they’ll take center stage around 5:30 p.m.

“The album just dropped on the 13th. It's me and Luke's first album with Lakeview, and I think it's been received pretty well,” Jesse Denaro of Lakeview said in an interview Tuesday. “A lot of our streaming partners have been supporting us and putting us on some playlists and just getting tagged and all the stories on Instagram, things like that. People have seemed to be really receptive to this new version of the genre that me and Luke are trying to spearhead.”

The duo — Denaro and Luke Healy — started making music in Nashville in 2019, and never looked back.

“We've been working on this since we pretty much moved to Nashville back in 2019, so this album is a culmination of five or six years of just blood, sweat and tears, touring and writing and recording and picking up side jobs to pay for the recordings and all this stuff,” Denaro said. “So it's, it's a really cool experience for me and Luke to kind of put the DNA of what Lakeview is all into one album. And we're just, we're excited for people to hear it and get to really understand who we are and why we do what we do.”

Their wide range of influences is apparent in their music. The group grew up as fans of bands like Randy Travis, Don Williams and, primarily, Nickelback, which Healy said provided a major source of inspiration in his personal musical development.

But their success hasn’t come as a surprise to them, Healy said — they see it as a blessing.

“I'd say it's more of a blessing that it is being successful,” he said. “It's becoming successful.”

Healy said he and Denaro aren’t necessarily unique as people and there are probably many others who, like them, love both country and rock 'n' roll music and could be successful in making it their career. That group of people, unsurprisingly, comprises their core fanbase.

“I'm not that surprised, because I think there's a lot more people out there like us than there isn't,” Healy said. “I think there's a lot of folks out there that love rock just as much as they love country and vice versa, something I've always noticed.”

The pair has noticed a gap in the market among major music makers, a gap which they sought to fill and are finding success in doing so.

“Because nobody was really knocking that out like in this, the last decade, I don't think there was any bands like that doing that,” he said. “So it wasn't surprising to me that people would enjoy the music and like the crossover, but it is surprising to me that we get to be a big part of it.”

Denaro said fans, new and old, who come out to their Lakes Region show will identify with their performance because they themselves were once the people in the crowd. 

“If you come to a Lakeview show, I mean, our ultimate goal is the shows that we put on — the crowd, and because we've been the people in the crowd,” he said. “So our goal is to just for 30 minutes or 50 minutes, or however long our set time is, it's just to let you forget about any [BS] in your life and just have a good time. Have a drink with your friends, just party it up, and, yeah, just high energy.”