The notion that a song can change someone’s life is insufficient to explain what has happened to Lucas Mason since March 18.
During his second of two concerts at Toronto’s Scotiabank Arena, Oklahoma-born country music star Zach Bryan invited the St. Francis Catholic Secondary School student onto the stage to sing one of his songs.
Bryan took off the guitar he was playing and handed it to Mason. The 17-year-old confidently stepped to the microphone, pointed to the sky, shouted “My name is Lucas Mason,” and began playing and singing. The crowd of 20,000 went wild and began to sing along with him.
Videos of the St. Catharines teen’s performance with Bryan and his band went viral. In a week, Mason’s following on the social media platform TikTok jumped from about 1,000 to more than 131,000.
In the meantime, Mason has been interviewed by American Songwriter magazine, Fox News, CP24, City TV’s Breakfast Television and radio stations across Canada and the United States. Music industry bigwigs have reached out to him and his family inquiring about whether or not he writes his own songs.
“All this attention feels great,” Mason tells The Local, “I don’t want it to fade away. And it’s been crazy at school. Everyone has been congratulating me. My friends keep calling me the famous guy. It’s amazing.”
The youngest son of Chris and Nikki Mason began playing electric guitar at about 12 years old, inspired by his 19-year-old brother Ethan. He took lessons at Thorold Music once a week and originally loved playing rock music.
Then Nikki, an elementary school music teacher, handed him an old acoustic guitar that she rarely played and he began to teach himself to play finger-style. His first public performance came when he and a classmate at their elementary school, St. Ann in Port Dalhousie, sang Green Day’s Good Riddance for their virtual Grade 8 graduation.
In Grade 9, Mason enroled in a guitar class at St. Francis. A bit more advanced in his playing than many of his classmates, he relished the opportunity to get better at his instrument for 75 minutes a day.
As his confidence began to build, he discovered country music. He began listening to Zach Bryan in 2021, and over the years, he started to work out how to play and sing his idol’s songs.
“Back then, nobody really knew about him,” says Mason. “I called up my buddy and told him he had to listen to this sad country guy. Back then, (Bryan) was recording all his songs at his house without a band. He sounded great, his poetry in his songs was amazing.”
Mason saw Bryan live for the first time in August 2022 when the singer-songwriter was part of Willie Nelson’s Outlaw Music Festival stop at Darien Lake in Corfu, New York. Eight months later he was in the audience at London, Ontario’s Budweiser Gardens for a concert during the musician’s Burn, Burn, Burn tour.
For his third time seeing his idol, Mason, along with some friends, arrived early at the venue to stake a claim near the right side of the stage,where he knew a microphone would be set up. Last Monday was a cold day and Mason was only wearing a t-shirt. A friendly stranger noticed and brought him a jacket from a nearby thrift store.
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Mason says he was the 15th person admitted into the Scotiabank Arena. He was carrying a sign reading “Can I play Heading South?, referring to one of Bryan’s songs, as his goal was to convince the superstar to invite him on stage.
But Scotiabank Arena security staff confiscated the sign, most likely because it was too big. Thinking quickly, Mason visited the merchandise table and bought a concert t-shirt. He removed the white t-shirt he had been wearing and wrote the phrase on that.
At one point in the show, Bryan referred to the previous evening’s concert, when he invited a fan up but he turned out to not be very good. He announced on Monday that he would not be taking the same risk that night.
But a group of people surrounding Mason started shouting toward the stage while pointing at the t-shirt he was holding up. Bryan started playing Heading South, then saw the commotion, stopped playing, and invited Mason closer to the stage.
“He asked me if I was sure I knew the song,” says Mason. “I swore to him that I did. Then he said ‘Alright, come on up’.”
Though Mason had been playing Heading South for nearly three years, the day before the concert he practiced the chords and the lyrics to the song from Bryan’s 2020 album Elisabeth which is fittingly about a young dreamer fighting to have his music heard. He nailed it.
“It was a bit scary, but I knew if I got the opportunity to get up there I had to make a statement,” says Mason. “It was the biggest opportunity I had ever had in my life. I ignored my shaking and just tried to put on a show.”
When the song was done, Bryan was smiling ear-to-ear. The superstar took off his guitar, a Gibson acoustic worth somewhere between $3,000 and $5,000, and handed it to Mason. “It’s yours,” he said to the awestruck teenager.
As they were filing out of the arena, concertgoers recognized Mason, still on a high following the show. When he and his friends boarded a GO train filled with Zach Bryan fans for the start of their trip back to Niagara, he was goaded by the crowd to play a couple of tunes during the ride.
Of course, he chose two more Zack Bryan songs, Something in the Orange and Revival. It turned into an unforgettable singalong.
For Mason, the wild ride hasn’t stopped. Videos of his performance, some tagged with the title “The fan who saved Toronto’s reputation”, have garnered between one and 11 million views on social media. And the phone has been ringing off the hook.
Probably because he looked so self-assured on stage, he’s been asked several times if it was all a set-up. He insists it was not.
“He’s an incredibly confident kid,” says his proud mother, Nikki. “He’s played a few gigs before (at the Hard Rock Cafe in Niagara Falls, Nola’s in Port Dalhousie, a couple of Christmas concerts) but nothing of this magnitude. The whole thing has just been a whirlwind.”
With the attention he has been receiving from people in the music industry, the football player and rower is re-evaluating his plans for his future. The Grade 11 student was planning to study kinesiology to become a physiotherapist. But right now he is concentrating on honing his songwriting chops.
“We’ll see what happens over the next couple of months,” says Lucas. “We’ll see how well certain people like my original music and see what happens with that. I had a plan, but I think things may have changed now. My whole mind is not thinking about school right now.”
And Nikki says she’s okay with that.
“This is a unique situation, where he has this opportunity,” she says. “It’s just been a week. He’s a smart kid and he has a good head on his shoulders. He’ll figure it out, and we’ll help him figure it out together.”
Lucas is hoping to play more gigs this summer, hopefully including some Niagara-on-the-Lake wineries, where he dropped off some tapes a few months ago.
With his confidence, his talent, his looks and that name - Lucas, or Luke Mason - though, don’t be surprised if you see him opening shows with his own band for Zach Bryan the next time his hero comes to town.
