Go ahead and tell Lee Brice his music's no good or you don't like the way he looks. But if you start telling lies, that's not OK with him.

When Brice and I talked before his Chicago show on Sunday (Aug. 31), he'd just gotten in from a two-night run of Luke Bryan shows in Indianapolis.

And after one of those shows, a concertgoer tweeted his disappointment in Brice's performance, alleging that the artist had had too much to drink.

Brice responded back via Twitter. Boy, did he respond.

"I had one drink," he wrote Brice wrote in a series of tweets to the accountant in Indianapolis who criticized his performance. "I take my job seriously. Sorry if you got the wrong impression. Give me your address, I'll send your money back. I do the best I can every night. You hop up in front of 20,000 and tell me how easy it is. Have a good night. Be safe.

"Dude, I leave my wife and kids to be out here on this road. Maybe think before you speak from now on."

When I asked Brice about the social-media criticism, he told me it's only the lies that get to him.

"If you say, 'Lee, you're fat, and your show sucked,' that's one thing. You can have your opinion. But to say that I was drunk onstage, when I pride myself on being professional, it's just slander. It burns me up," he said. "I'm usually very passive, but when you say something about me that isn't true, that's when I really get fired up. If you're telling a lie about me, that affects me and everyone around me.

We talked about how people don't always realize that they're not just tweeting to a machine but to people who have feelings.

"People don't think about that. People have a big platform these days. And I just don't think the younger folks know what it's like to never have had that platform," Brice said, adding that common sense should always prevail.

"If you're not gonna say something nice ... say nothing at all," he said.

Brice isn't always so serious on Twitter, though. When another follower tweeted he should get off the stage, Brice responded, "Man. Hate to disappoint you. Luke asked us to be out here. Maybe he should have asked you."