Q’s With A.J. Croce: Embracing The Past, Celebrating The Present & Honoring His Father With ‘Croce Plays Croce’

A.J. Croce’s got a lot more than a name he shares with his late father. He forged his own path as a singer, songwriter and musician, mastering the piano and guitar at a young age and playing live music as a teenager. He’s even worked with legends like James Brown, Willie Nelson. B.B. King and Ray Charles.

Throughout his journey, Croce established himself as a celebrated artist who works with all genres, from jazz to rock ‘n’ roll to world music, over the course of three decades, developing his own sound before embracing his father’s music on the live stage decades later. His father is none other than legendary folk singer Jim Croce — who broke through in 1972 with the hit song “Time in a Bottle” and died a year later — and fans recently got an opportunity to hear the Croce family legacy live on stage.

A.J. Croce embarked on a successful North American headline tour this year titled “Croce Plays Croce,” which celebrated his music as well as his father’s catalog by performing their hit songs and sharing stories with the crowd. The San Diego native performed in popular venues like The Wilbur in Boston and Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium, where he grossed $97,323 and sold 1,639 tickets in October. He’s bringing the tour on the road again in 2026 with shows in markets like Huntsville, Memphis, Oklahoma City, San Antonio, Houston and Santa Barbara.

Croce recently spoke to Pollstar about the tour, reconnecting with his father’s music and the evolution of the music business.

Pollstar: Congratulations on the tour this year. Tell me about the birth of the concept and why you were ready to honor your father in this way.

A.J. Croce: I was touring for 30 years before I really performed any of my father’s music. It’s one of those things where you have less to prove to yourself as you get older and less to prove to others, and it’s more about the joy of doing it. In the beginning, it was a necessity to play my own music, to be heard doing what I do. And then, of course, I was touring a lot with these pretty iconic artists: Ray Charles and starting off with B.B. King on tour at a really young age, and Taj Mahal, the Neville Brothers and Aretha [Franklin] and James Brown.

That was really what guided me. Those people, Willie Nelson as well, really encouraged me to do what I did. It wasn’t something that was derivative of my father’s music.

Now, that’s not to say I didn’t love my father’s music. It was not to say that I didn’t work hard behind the scenes to make sure that his catalog had a life and that people would hear it. It was important to me that his music was heard because I’m proud of it, because I think it’s great, because it has a universal appeal. And I wanted to make sure that younger generations heard that sincerity and that real, organic nature of who he was.

It just took time. a lot of years of playing a lot of different styles of music and writing with hundreds of different people and thousands of songs. And finally, I felt like I could do this in a way that allows me to be who I am as an artist. I wanted to be able to have the freedom to do my own music. I wanted to have the freedom to connect my father’s music with my music.

There was something that happened about 25 years ago, I was archiving a bunch of his reel-to-reel tapes and digital to digital. There was a particular tape that I was listening to that really made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up because there were these songs, which I had played since I was 13 years old, I never heard my dad sing, never heard him play. It was on quarter-inch reel to reel tape, and it was really obscure stuff. It was Fats Waller, but not “Ain’t Misbehavin” or “Honeysuckle Rose.” It was “You’re Not the Only Oyster in the Stew,” and there were Pink Anderson and Bessie Smith songs and Mississippi John Hurt songs and Jimmie Rodgers songs.

Every single one of these songs was something that I had either performed live in concert or put on demos. A Fats Waller song was on my first demo for Columbia Records when I was 18. I mean, it was really spooky to hear it all. He chose the exact same song.

I realized we had this connection as far as the things we loved. It’s like meeting a new friend who has all of the same tastes as you, but it was my dad and that was the first step to this.

That’s a great story.

Also, for what would have been his 70^th birthday almost 13 years ago, I did a special little show and played his music. It was just an hour, and I played a set of my own stuff first because it just wasn’t going to be a long enough show. Even though there were about 100 people, I just felt the mood of the place, the reaction of the people and how moving it was, how emotional it was for them. I saw people crying, and some people laughing. It just hit in the right places, and it was a really beautiful thing.

Someone around that time called me up and said, “Would you be willing to do a show of your father’s music?” And I didn’t really feel comfortable doing that. I’m not really a cover band. They asked if I’d consider incorporating some of my music, and I started to think about it. And from there, it wasn’t a tremendous leap to think about how to incorporate the music that obviously influenced both of us. That nostalgia is obviously really powerful.

I started to think of how to put that show together, and it evolved. It took a lot of time, a lot of writing, because one of the secrets of the show is all the stories that I tell. My father could play for 2 ½ hours and only maybe six songs, telling stories of where they came from. That was the secret sauce of this show. I didn’t want to go over the top with storytelling, but I needed it to be a strong element. The incarnation was in 2022 with the 50^th anniversary of You Don’t Mess Around with Jim, and I played the album from beginning to end.

It was developed pretty organically, as organically as my coming to play the show.

When I’m afraid of something, I feel like I gotta dive in. I didn’t know how people would accept it. I figured there were going to be people that loved it, that figured I had a free pass when I walked on stage and there was an element of nostalgia. And then they see me, all of a sudden, their past becomes present. There’s a third dimension to it. I realized that it was not just about my father. It was that there really was a family legacy of music. It wasn’t just his; it also included mine. But of course, it was the love of the music, and it’s from all over the world. We’re both influenced by different kinds of folk music from around the world.

The routing of the tour includes some pretty amazing venues. How was honoring your father’s legacy at the Ryman Auditorium?

It’s like one of the greatest gifts I could imagine. I’ve played there twice. I mean, selling out the Ryman, the first time I played there, I was just completely humbled, honestly. And playing Town Hall [in New York] and the Orpheum in L.A. and selling out, I just couldn’t believe how many people were inspired by it.

Seeing CBS Sunday Morning, People magazine and all these national outlets around – it really helped to get an audience at least curious about it. But what I didn’t expect was that people would come three, four, five, six, seven times to this show because every night is different. Every night, I take requests from the audience, and it’s really for the sake of the band and myself to play the song that people come to hear. There’s a lot of songs, and people have heard me play for many years, whether it’s my music or a cover of someone’s that I do my way.

It’s really important for me to open up the dialogue with the audience and to be able to be as nimble as possible with not just all of my father’s catalog, but also with mine, which is, you know, 11 albums worth of music. And then all of these random covers that I might get requests for: it could be a Pink Anderson song or Paul McCartney, or it could be The Rolling Stones or Elton John. Who knows what someone’s going to ask for in a given evening. It really is fun for the band and me. It comes naturally because I started off playing in jazz clubs and blues clubs.

You visited quite a few big markets this year. What led you to extend the run into 2026?

We went through the first time and did really well. It kind of grew in a certain way, and I think that more people wanted to come and see it after they heard that the first time. So we’re going back, but this is a little different.

When I set up the show for the fall concerts and for what’s going to be happening next year, I really reworked the show and the stories. I want the people that are coming for the third or fourth time to this show to see something different. Obviously, we’re going to play the hits, but I put different deep cuts in the set.

You work as a musician and on the label side of the business, as well. So much has changed in just the last 10 years, particularly when it comes to touring. How do you see the state of music industry, especially post-COVID?

As a recording artist, it’s easy to go really dark on this because Napster really changed everything. It made music free and music didn’t have a value. Even though Spotify came along, it’s still $10 a month for as much music as you want to listen to. It’s still very little. Obviously, it’s not enough to pay the artists anything that’s reasonable or fair or equitable.

That being said, it’s the world we live in, and we need to adapt to the world that we live in. And I think that I think there’s something really interesting that started to happen with social media, and this was sort of right after Napster and right at the beginning of the streaming services. There were a lot more indies. I have two independent labels. That became relevant distribution and became more important than just having a big label. There was something really beautiful that happened that was kind of unexpected. And I can say that it really developed greatly during the pandemic.

After that, because of the streaming services. we had a really egalitarian way of choosing the music we wanted to hear. It’s more a thousand artists who were getting seen by millions of people, and it became the choice of the listener and the choice of the consumer to decide what they wanted to hear.

For all of music’s history, through the beginning of recorded music until the early 2000s, the labels were the filter. They were the tastemakers. They chose what they thought was the best. There were limits to what you could buy. There were a lot of choices, but not like there were when social media made it possible. It was a combination of technology, people having home studios and being able to record things at a high level on their own and being able to upload them.  I think there’s something really beautiful about it.

I was pretty grateful that I had a career going into the pandemic because I really equated it to the Depression in a lot of ways. I thought this could go like the Depression, when artists had radio shows and bands that were recognized. This is early swing era and blues and string band music. The ones who were able to make it through the early part of the Depression became household names and icons, whether it was Duke Ellington or Count Basie or Fats Waller or any number of other people who had started in the late 20s and had not really had a chance to get a foothold but were rediscovered in the ’50s or ’60s, like Mississippi John Hurt and Skip James.

What I didn’t expect was that what had been occurring already would continue. It would be a matter of the people who were most ambitious, the people who were most tech savvy and able to perform in front of a camera and livestream, to build an audience that they didn’t really have in a live setting. There were a lot of young acts that were good, but they were just green. They hadn’t played a lot of shows, and they came out of the pandemic ready to go on tour. And I think that was a pretty cool thing that came out of it, for sure.

What do you look forward to in 2026?

“Croce Plays Croce” is a show that will continue to evolve, something that I play a month or two out of the year, whether it’s in the U.S. or overseas. I’ll continue to release my own music and to write and record and to tour.

This interview was edited for length and clarity.