The Kentucky Gentlemen
Nashville wasn’t ready for Derek and Brandon Campbell when they arrived almost a decade ago from Versailles, their small hometown near Lexington, Ky. As country duo The Kentucky Gentlemen, the twin brothers stand out with effervescent harmonies, and they’re equally deft at soulful anthems and buoyant dance bops. But the mainstream country machine passed over the Campbells, confused — at best — by their unapologetic celebrations of their queer and Black identities. Their debut album Rhinestone Revolution, out June 6 via River House Artists, is the culmination of countless setbacks and hundreds of hours writing songs.
The Gentlemen have something important to say, but not at the expense of enjoyable music — this album is fun as hell. However, in an industry that has an iron grip on who’s allowed to hold a mic and wear a cowboy hat, there’s a revolution in the beat. Take “Denim on Denim” for example: It has a flashy groove that pulls from ’90s R&B as much as it does country, and there’s no ambiguity as to what kind of riding the cowboys in this song are doing.
“We realized that there’s strength, and that who we are is different from a lot of people that you’re shown in country music,” Derek explains. “If we lean into those differences and lean into what makes us us, maybe we’ll feel less down. ‘Maybe this thing will happen, maybe this dream will become a lot easier.’ [Laughs.] No — it did not become easier!”
“We knew that if we tackled it by being our authentic selves, that regardless of what happened in the end, at least we were ourselves while doing it,” Brandon adds. “At least we didn’t try to be people that we were not.”
While The Kentucky Gentlemen can’t help but be aware of and affected by the culture war that’s become a dominant feature in American politics, they’re choosing not to let it dictate how they think or how they express themselves.
“It’s a constant war that you didn’t ask to be a part of,” Derek says. “This isn’t our war. This is y’all’s — and we’re gonna be joyful over here.”
The Kentucky Gentlemen
Anyone who has seen the Gentlemen live knows that blend of joy, tears and defiance is a hallmark of their show. The pair leans into their striking similarities while highlighting their differences through sinuous choreography and angelic harmonies, creating an enchanting unity within their duality. That’s by design.
“We definitely play off each other’s differences, and we consider that more of a strong point instead of a weakness,” Brandon explains. The twins highlight these differences in their stage gear: Derek favors headscarves, while Brandon opts for cowboy hats and clothing to which the pair has added rhinestones by hand — a laborious process considering the twins’ love for the glimmering faux gems. Their attention to visuals is a very deliberate part of how the duo hopes to subvert people’s assumptions.
“ Music is a way of sharing your story,” says Derek. “But because of how we walk around this world, how we’re perceived has always been such a large part of who we are. The visual is just as important. The album has a theme: ‘shining anyway.’ We won’t be hidden.”
The Gentlemen take an equally disciplined approach to music. When they first arrived in Nashville, they committed to writing one song a day, and that resulted in a catalog of more than 400. Quantity doesn’t equal quality, of course. But the pair never wanted to go to an industry event without a few bangers in their pockets. The practice also helped them come into their own as writers.
“We sit down with a blank canvas, but once we even have a speck on that canvas, we start to get really intentional about it and make sure that it’s what we want to say and how we want to say it,” explains Derek. “That reflects our — for lack of a better word — cheeky way of dealing with a lot of tough things, and how we laugh through the pain, and cry about it, and then laugh again. Doing that together, that’s therapy for us as well.”
As a result, the Gentlemen don’t see a tension between those sassier songs and the ones that touch the marrow, like “To Kill Me,” the album’s opener. It frames the Gentlemen’s odyssey to create an album that is truly theirs.
“ We sit down and we write songs like ‘To Kill Me,’ and we record them, and we cry in the studio while we record them,” says Derek. Being surrounded by talented musicians, he notes, led to an emotional realization: “It all feels right because it’s all part of the human experience.” Then for some much-needed levity, they recorded crowd favorite “Vintage Lover.”
So what does it take to launch a rhinestone revolution?
“ I truly do think it’s going to take everyone to start showing up as themselves, loving on themselves unapologetically, and loving on each other, unapologetically,” Derek says. “It’s gonna take all that — and about a hundred pounds of rhinestones.”
