Illustrations by Kyle Webster * Photos by Chapman Bachler As the country duo Brooks & Dunn worked their way through interviews to promote their new album and tour last summer, both men kept referencing the same song whenever they talked about their careers. Surprisingly, it wasn’t the new record’s lead-off single, “Play Something Country,” which was climbing the charts at the time. It wasn’t even a track from the new album, Hillbilly Deluxe, which is what you would’ve expected them to be promoting. Instead, in interviews done separately and together, Ronnie Dunn and Kix Brooks repeatedly brought up their 2003 hit “Red Dirt Road,” a semi-autobiographical song they wrote based on growing up in the rural Southwest. Both consider it a watershed moment where art and ambition merged in a way that it hadn’t done for them before. “There was no looking back after that,” Brooks said in a recent interview, punctuating the quiet of his Brentwood kitchen with a typically explosive laugh. “We’d raised our bar, and now we know we have to aim high.” The following day, Dunn echoed this sentiment while stretched out on a leather sofa in the barn he’s converted into a stylish two-story retreat on a back lot of his Brentwood ranch. “Lyrically, we’re starting to write deeper now,” said the lanky, rooster-haired Oklahoman. “We’re putting more grit and more reality into what we’re doing.” The duo, whose album and ticket sales were declining at the turn of the decade, have experienced an across-the-board surge of late, especially after retooling how they write songs and make records. They also changed producers and eventually shook up their management team; ultimately, though, their successful revival came down to words and music. Out went middle-of-the-road duets with fellow stars and covers of old rock hits. Even though those sorts of records kept the duo in heavy rotation on the radio, they hardly meshed with the image of the two blue-collar roughnecks who had started out as party-hearty, boot-scooting honky-tonkers. Brooks & Dunn have always been rousing entertainers who could connect with a crowd; that’s one of the reasons the Country Music Association asked them to host their annual televised awards after Vince Gill stepped aside a couple years ago. The two guys pull off a Newman-and-Redford give-and-take with a witty, laid-back charm that doesn’t hide the rowdier side simmering beneath the surface. And they’re quick enough on their feet to handle the New York press corps or any last-minute production changes that get thrown at them. At the same time, they’re down-home and self-effacing enough to appeal to country fans and casual viewers. Nevertheless, the two are almost embarrassed by their role as CMA hosts. “I will be the first to tell you I’m not at all comfortable with this,” Dunn says. “I think the allure is that people know for a fact that we’re going to walk out there uncomfortable. It creates tension right off the bat.” As country music undergoes another revival, the tension between commercial accessibility and creative striving that Brooks & Dunn have learned to negotiate so well has reasserted itself on Music Row. Much of the current country surge is built on stars who emerged in the ’90s and have recently undergone a metamorphosis, only to emerge more popular than ever. There’s Alan Jackson, whose heartfelt response to the attacks of Sept. 11, “Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning),” was but one in a series of remarkable singles he’s released in the last few years that came from somewhere deep inside him. There’s Kenny Chesney, who retooled his image and his music to gainsay those who had once dismissed him as a second-rate hat act. There’s Toby Keith, who changed record companies, twice, so that he could gain control of his recordings and step out from the mild-mannered pack with an outspoken, sometimes obstreperous bravado. There’s Tim McGraw, who refuses to follow predictable formulas and who used his own money to bankroll his own recordings, giving him the freedom to forge his own sound. Similarly, a number of female acts, everyone from Faith Hill, Martina McBride and Patty Loveless, to Lee Ann Womack, Sara Evans and Terri Clark, have grown while changing directions or subverting expectations. In each case, the surviving artist made the transition from the ’90s by digging deeper or by stepping out with more nerve than they’d shown before. Moving away from the stylistic straitjackets and skin-deep youth movement of the late ’90s, country music has achieved its current resurgence precisely because it has refused to be so easily dismissed. That difference can be seen in the younger acts who’ve found a foothold this decade. One quality shared among emerging superstars like Keith Urban, Brad Paisley and Rascal Flatts is that they’re so different from each other. Add to that the ground-shaking success of Gretchen Wilson and Big & Rich, and mix in distinctive up-and-comers like Dierks Bentley and Sugarland—all of whom write their own material—and it’s clear that country music is as healthy as it’s been in a long time as it marches into Manhattan for this week’s CMA Awards broadcast. Best of all, this success is spread out; it doesn’t rest on one Garth-gantuan set of shoulders. The genre doesn’t have one predominant act the way it did during the years when the crown passed from Garth Brooks to Shania Twain to the Dixie Chicks. Chesney may sell the most tickets, Urban may get the most screams, McGraw and Hill might draw the most media heat, and Jackson may have the most stock among traditionalists. But the paparazzi won’t be lying in wait to rush any one act; they’ll be screaming out the names of a panoply of stars. This may be the best vital sign country music has: the tent once again is bigger and broader, the faces inside it more unique and diverse, and the power more evenly distributed among the leaders. The holdovers from country music’s ’90s boom who’ve fallen by the wayside in recent years have failed to inject any daring or energy into their music. Not Brooks & Dunn. For the two of them, whose tours have been among country music’s most exciting spectacles year after year, getting their act back together involved a major overhaul. This resurrection began with 2001’s Steers & Stripes. Despite the silly pun in its name, the album washed away the pudgy center of the band’s late-’90s work. The duo’s 1991 debut, Brand New Man, still stands as their high-water mark in the ’90s, producing a string of top hits, including the album’s title track, “My Next Broken Heart” and “Boot Scootin’ Boogie.” The CD sold 5 million copies and catapulted Brooks & Dunn to the highest ranks of country music’s ’90s upsurge, alongside Garth Brooks, Clint Black, Alan Jackson and Trisha Yearwood. The duo’s follow-up albums weren’t as strong, but they carved out a compelling image of two sharp-dressed, rough-around-the-edges guys who cranked up the guitars on good-time turbo-tonkers and left room enough for Dunn to step forward with his emotion-drenched ballads. But by the time they started singing duets with Reba McEntire and issuing flaccid singles like their remake of Roger Miller’s “Husbands and Wives” and John Waite’s “Missing You” (not to mention shallow goofs like “Beer Thirty”), anyone could see that something had been lost along the way. “The fans didn’t necessarily go away; we just weren’t giving them good albums,” Brooks told me in a 2001 interview, citing 1999’s Tight Rope as a particular low point. “Face it, we were 10 years down the road, and a lot of people already had Brooks & Dunn records. Without coming up with something really good, we were going to slip. We really hadn’t been delivering.” By 2000, the duo decided to shift producers, bringing in Mark Wright and dropping longtime collaborator Don Cook. “Ain’t Nothing ’Bout You,” the first single from Steers & Stripes, revealed Brooks & Dunn reimagined with more force and fire. It also became their first No. 1 single after a series of failures. Inspired by their success, the duo dug in deeper for Red Dirt Road. The title song celebrated backroads as the rite of passage for rural teens in the same way that Bruce Springsteen’s “Thunder Road” had spoken for urban youth. The song’s central conceit turned on the dissonance born of growing up wild in a religious household, an archetype for many Southern-bred adults who saw themselves in the lines, “It’s where I drank my first beer / It’s where I found Jesus / It’s where I wrecked my first car / I tore it all to pieces.” The song, oddly enough the last that Brooks and Dunn have written together at this point, forced both men to stop focusing entirely on hooks and instead invest more of themselves into their songs. “We rode that good-timin’, honky-tonk thing forever—maybe too long,” Dunn says. “Obviously, it was working, but you realize you can do more. Whatever it was going to cost, we had to take that risk. There’s more depth here that we’re capable of. We’ve challenged ourselves to draw on our lives and to open up and tell the truth in our songs, and frankly it’s been real exciting to take this step.” Just as crucial to the renewal of their music and career, Brooks & Dunn started opening up about aspects of their pasts that they’d long avoided. As Dunn explains it, he began to realize what made guys like Johnny Cash and Merle Haggard such heroes was that they exposed the rough truths about their lives, including their hardscrabble beginnings. “We’d bought into the idea that you were supposed to hide that stuff, that we were selling ourselves as good-time guys who didn’t talk about the real hard things,” Dunn says. “We didn’t think that was what we were supposed to do.” But as Brooks & Dunn looked at what separated the current generation of country stars from their idols, they saw that part of the disconnect they were feeling had to do with their backstories. Fans knew how Cash, Haggard, Loretta Lynn and Dolly Parton grew up, and that history gave the music the force of the truth. “We’re opening the book a little wider to say that there’s actually two guys here who’ve experienced life a little, in some cases more than you might want to hear about,” Dunn says. “We’re washing that good-timin’, honky-tonk twins stuff off, or at least the superficial aspect of it.” For his part, Dunn began talking about his violent struggles with his father, who served time in Leavenworth and who once pulled a knife on his son during an argument. At the opposite extreme was the singer’s Bible-thumping, teetotaling mother. Those competing impulses still dog him today. Meanwhile, Brooks has revealed that his mother died of breast cancer when he was 3, and that his grandmother, who moved into the family’s home in Shreveport to take care of him, died of a massive stroke when he was 7. His dad remarried, and Kix had such explosive run-ins with his stepmother that he was packed off to military school when he was 14. On their latest album, Hillbilly Deluxe, Brooks & Dunn still sing about women heading out on the town to dance and live it up, just as they always have, but even the lighthearted material comes from a personal place. The CD’s first hit, the guitar-driven “Play Something Country,” borrows a phrase that Dunn’s father used to bark at the young singer, then still a kid, when he played a song his dad thought veered too far outside tradition. Deeper still are Brooks’ story-song “Her West Was Wilder” and Dunn’s “Believe,” a spiritual that uses a smoldering gospel arrangement to give voice to a personal credo that takes into account traditional and nontraditional teachings. The latter song is far from an obvious country single, both in its diffuse, slow-burn arrangement and its layered, provocative message. But Dunn pushed for it, and he convinced his record company and the Country Music Association to allow the duo to perform it on the CMA awards show Tuesday, hoping the public performance will give the unconventional single the boost it needs. “It’s a risk, but it’s one I’m willing to take,” Dunn says. “It’s a risk we have to take. We know that now. You can’t keep playing it safe all the time.” Brooks & Dunn aren’t the only artists in Nashville working under the acceptable-risk theory these days. There are a lot of big-stakes gambles that will cash in at this year’s CMA Awards—from Brad Paisley’s gambit with “Alcohol” and Lee Ann Womack’s back-to-the-roots move There’s More Where That Came From, to Keith Urban’s banjo-and-guitar hoedowns, to Kenny Chesney’s willingness to go deeper with his music. Ultimately, this is the best message Nashville can take to New York—namely, that we know who we are and aren’t afraid to show it. Auspiciously enough, it even embraces a couple of old Madison Avenue axioms: “Truth sells” and “You have to roll the dice to win.”
