By Chris Zebo
Last week we caught up with Reckless Kelly frontman Willy Braun to talk about the band’s new album, Good Luck and True Love. We also talked to Willy about the state of the music industry, about moving to Austin from Idaho to start the band’s career 15 years ago, about Austin as the Southern cradle of the arts, and so much more.
Reckless Kelly will be playing at the Texas Hall of Fame on Friday, October 28.
MW: Your new record, Good Luck and True Love, is your third self-produced album. It’s also the first album to be released on your own record label, No Big Deal. You’re also managing yourselves now. The band has full creative control over itself. What motivated you to cut everyone out and take the reigns?
Willy: We’ve had a lot of different labels over the years. And the way the industry is moving these days, with digital downloads, and outsourcing stuff, independent labels are doing publicity and radio promotion. We just kinda always wanted to try it out. It just seemed like right now was the perfect time for people like us to give it a wing. The industry is moving in a way where you can do a lot of stuff on your own. It’s still a lot of work, but hopefully the rewards will be a little better. And it also gives us creative control over the sound and what we want to put out there.
MW: You allude to this feeling of independence in a song on the new album called “New Moon Over Nashville.” Is that song a tongue-in-cheek critique of the music biz?
Willy: That song’s not really autobiographical or anything. It’s more about the music scene up in Nashville and the music that’s coming out on the radio.
It seems like it’s been over 20 years since there’s been much music coming out of Nashville that I thought was real country music. I’ve just been thinking for several years that at some point it’s gonna go back to a more traditional country sound and the music will get a little better. And it just hasn’t.
There’s a ton of great musicians up in Nashville that nobody really ever hears, unless you’re down in some little bar in Lower Broadway.
So that’s what the song is about. It’s really just kind of a hope, some optimism that some day maybe country radio will start playing real country music again.
MW: It seems like the Texas country scene has always been the renegade in the country music business. The “outlaw” movement has always had firm roots in Texas. Do you feel that liberty here?
Willy: Yeah. The main difference between Texas and Nashville is that up there it’s largely industry-driven. It seems like down here the musicians have a lot more control over what they want to do, more of the outlaw approach. A little more of the “our way or the highway” kind of approach.
There is a little bit of industry down here, but it’s mostly centered around live music, honest music, stuff that’s a little more down-to-earth and truer to the people that are singing it.
MW: When you and your brother Cody were up in Oregon before moving to Austin, was that the gravitational pull you felt, the reason you moved here to anchor your career?
Willy: I always loved the Texas sound. My dad turned us on to a lot of Texas artists and singers and songwriters when we were growing up. And so we always knew there was a really cool scene down here. When we were trying to figure out where we were gonna move, we thought about Nashville, and even L.A. and New York. Austin just kept poppin’ up on our list. It really seemed like a good fit for us, and we had never really been down here really, but we just kind of packed up and moved down here and gave it a shot. And it worked out great for us, for 15 years. Still love it.
Cody and I moved to Oregon from Idaho—that’s where we grew up, in Idaho—and we moved to Oregon mostly because we met a couple guys over there that were into the same type of music we were and they were really good musicians.
We went to Oregon for about a year. There wasn’t much country music going on over there, especially at the time—kinda right at the end of the grunge movement. The music scene was really angry. We had a hard time finding places to play. So we were only there for about a year, packed up, and moved to Texas.
MW: Did any of the grunge scene have an effect on the rock side of your music?
Willy: Ah, a little bit of it. Our bass player, Chris, was really into that scene. He was playing for a couple different bands. There was a rock edge that, I guess, came from that.
But for the most part, our sound came from the records we listened to at the time. We really liked that Sun Volt record, Trace. We were listening to Billy Ray Shaver’s Live at Smith’s Olde Bar. A lot of Steve Earle. And for the rock ‘n’ roll we were listening to, it was more like the Stones, the Beatles and Zepplin—more old school stuff.
Of course, growing up in that era, we listened to Pearl Jam and Nirvana and all that stuff, too. But we always kind of wanted to blend country and rock together. It’s been done a thousand times, but we just felt there was a different twist you could put on it.
MW: What’s going on, backstage, in alt-country as a genre right now? Is it still evolving, or is it stagnant?
Willy: It’s hard to say. There are so many new bands coming out and old bands still trying to reinvent the wheel that in some ways it is getting stagnant and a little bit washed out. There’s just a lot of different new music coming out; some of it’s good, and some of it’s just a little bit generic.
We try to just reinvent ourselves a little bit whenever we make a record, but not too much to where we stray too much from what people like about us in the first place.
MW: Do you think pressure from the industry to conform to a sound—to just produce the same radio-friendly stuff that’s made money in the past—is hindering the genre’s growth?
Willy: Yeah, that’s the main problem—not just with Nashville radio but radio in general. The people that are running it are kind of aware of the problem; they know it’s stagnant, they know there’s just not a lot of groundbreaking new stuff coming out. There also just scared to just try anything new because it’s still kind of working. And it seems like especially Nashville, the big thing now, you know, if somebody has a song out about fried chicken, then everybody’s writing songs about fried chicken. It’s like, “Oh, that worked. That was #1.” So everybody writes songs about sailboats now, or whatever the latest big hit is. They just all jump on that bandwagon.
That happens in a lot of genres, but especially in Nashville that’s happening now. Really, I’ve been thinking, for 20 years, that it really can’t get any worse….and along comes “She Thinks My Tractor Looks Sexy,” or “Honky Tonk Badonkadonk.” (laughing) I never thought it would get that bad.
MW: It happened! It’s not just a dream.
Willy: I was saying the other day, “Boot Scootin’ Boogey” came on somewhere and I was like, “Man, I never really thought I’d look back on this song kind of fondly and think, ‘Well that wasn’t so bad compared to the stuff coming out now.” (laughing) I’d take Billy Ray Cyrus over some of the new dudes that are out on the scene now.
MW: Austin has really changed drastically in less than a decade. It’s the hipster’s kingdom, but there’s still other music buried under the tattoos. How does country fit into the mix down there nowadays?
Willy: I think the real traditional country is still popular here. The Dale Watsons and Heybale! and the guys down at Donn’s Depot are playing their regular weekly gigs. A lot of the real honky tonk stuff is still alive here. But for some reason, the new wave of the red dirt scene—the Randy Rogers and the Cross Canadians and Wade Bowens and guys like us—hasn’t caught on in Austin as it has in the rest of the state.
Like you say, it’s a little bit on the hipster side, but Austin’s always been so eclectic that there’s all kinds of music here and a lot of options. People can go out and hear what they wanna hear here. The new red dirt movement has caught on a lot bigger in the rest of the state, and Austin just has enough variety to where it’s a part of it but it’s not the main focus.
MW: New York’s always been the melting pot of culture and Austin is the melting pot of music.
Willy: Yeah, it’s great. About two months ago, I went out and saw a bunch of music. The variety of stuff I saw was incredible. I saw Steve Earle play in a theater here in town, I saw Marcia Ball in a park, went and saw a jazz trio one night, and Alejandro Escovedo—who’s kind of country rock but more old school rock ‘n’ roll—and a couple of other bands—all in a space of about 5 days. I can’t think of any other place in the world where you can hear that kind of variety and at that quality level.
MW: Does the Austin music stew become an inspiration for the band? Does it come into the music?
Willy: Yeah. It’s a real motivational place to be. It’s a real artist-friendly town. There are lot of musicians here, a lot of artsy people, people that are creative. To be able to go out and see so much great music here is definitely an inspiration for me. I’m halfway though a show sometimes just watching people and I can’t wait to get home and pull out my guitar and just write, just because you’re surrounded by creative people and people doing what they do really well.
And the normal people—the civilians, we call them—they treat the artists really well down here. There’s places where you go and you tell people you’re a musician or an artist and you get a feeling they’re not so crazy about that and wouldn’t want you to be dating their daughters. But down here in Austin, they look up to you as opposed to looking down on you.
MW: So…you can date their daughters?
Willy: (Laughing) Sometimes.
About Chris Zebo