Reckless Kelly’s Willy Braun Talks Longevity and Telling American Stories
The Idaho-based Americana and Outlaw Country band Reckless Kelly has been going for over 25 years, but they have a new album in the works, have substantial touring booked up through 2025 on The Last Frontier Tour, and this year their family is celebrating the 40th anniversary of local music festival, The Braun Brothers’ Reunion. Like many bands, they’ve been reconsidering what touring means to them and how they’d like to structure that part of their lives, so will be dialing back substantially on strings of live dates after 2025. That opens up other possibilities when it comes to writing, recording, and what events they’d like to focus on.
The band consists of Willy Braun, his brother Cody Braun, and Jay Nazz, as well as Geoff Queen and Joe Miller, and while they’ve released a live album and a demos album in recent years, their 2020 double album American Jackpot/American Girls stands as a big testament to their songwriting themes and sonic diversity. I spoke with Willy Braun about touring, acting as sole producer on the double album, and some of the ideas from their recent albums that may well stand the test of time.
Hannah Means-Shannon: I know you’ve started on a process of touring that will continue into 2025, but touring is changing for you after that. Does that feel like a happy horizon for you?
Willy Braun: We’re going to cap it at about 35 shows a year after that. It’s been a long 25 plus years of playing between 150 and 200 shows a year, and we’re scaling it back. After next summer, we’re just not doing the every-day, all-day tours, and make a record now and then. We’ll be done with hitting the road full-time.
HMS: That’s quite a contrast and I can appreciate that. Over the past couple of years, a lot of artists have been reevaluating touring, since for many people the road dog lifestyle got stopped for a while. That helped them realize this wasn’t how they wanted things to be. They wanted to be making albums and playing select shows.
WB: That sort of happened to us. During the pandemic shutdown, we didn’t play a show for 446 days. That was quite a bit of a break. We managed to pull through that, but like you said, it made us reevaluate the way that we’d always done it. That’s the best way to put it for us. It’s not that we were sick and tired of it, it’s just that we realized there was another way to do it. We like this band and we love playing music together, but we’re just redoing things.
HMS: Maybe we need to normalize these conversations for musicians. It’s not a cookie cutter world and not everyone does everything the same way.
WB: No, not at all, and the music industry is constantly changing. It’s hard for independent bands to keep up with the changes. With streaming and social media, it gets harder to promote a tour. It’s the constant evolution that’s gotten pretty tough for a lot of musicians, us included.
HMS: And if you think you’ve got it figured out, it’s going to change on you!
WB: Absolutely. It’s constant.
HMS: The other momentous thing that’s happening this year is the 40th anniversary of The Braun Brothers Family Reunion. That is mind-blowing. No one manages to run events for that length of time. How do you think you and your family have managed to keep going for so long?
WB: It’s kind of wild. My mom and dad have been doing concerts up in Idaho a long time, and it took us forever to figure out how long we’ve been doing this. We all came to the consensus that it’s been about 40 years. It’s always been something that we kept in-house. It’s a family run business and most, if not all, the people who work the festival have been doing it with us for a long time. Now, their kids are helping us work it. My brothers and I have taken it over from our parents. They are still involved, but we are doing most of the heavy lifting.
We haven’t had outside influence to fight with. It’s always probably going to be about the same size because of the town that it’s in. It’s got this built-in cap and I think that’s one of the things people like about it. We probably have room for 10,000 people on the golf course where we do it, but there’s only 3,500 people there, so there’s a lot of room for people to spread out. It’s a really fun, laid-back festival. I think that’s helped a lot and it’s unique in that sense.
HMS: I’ve been talking about festivals lately with folks, mainly newer festivals, and it’s a whole different ball-game when they are trying to retro-fit a festival into a community. But what you have there is invaluable because it’s sustainable, organic connection to the community.
WB: For sure. We started with a flat bed trailer and half a dozen local bands. As it grew, it went to two days, and we built a stage. Now it’s a three-day thing and we get fans from all over the country and all over the world. It grew up with the town. The town has really been supportive of it. It’s definitely the biggest weekend of the year for them.
HMS: That’s part of local history now. Do you have a sense yet of how scaling back the number of shows you’re doing might affect writing and recording music for you? Will you have more time for that now?
WB: That might stay relatively the same. I hope that I’ll start writing a little more, but my writing style has always been to save up ideas. I have ideas all the time, whether it be a hook line or a melody. I just kind of stash them away, then when I have a week or two, I hunker down. I live up in Idaho in the middle of nowhere, so it’s really easy for me to shut the phone off, and pick up a bunch of ideas, and knock them all out at once. I do that a few times a year and I’ll be able to get a record written. It’s a little early to tell, but I might start writing a little more, or writing for other people. We’ve always gone a couple of years between records. It’ll be interesting to see if I do a lot more writing.
HMS: I know that the most recent things that have come out from you all is a live album and a demo collection, but I’m still thinking about that double album that you released. There are so many amazing songs on it. You had taken the bull by the horns on production for that, right?
WB: Yes, that was the first time that I did production all by myself. Cody and our old guitar player, David, and I had done a few together, and we’ve had some off-site producers over the course of the history of the band. But I wanted to do that one on my own. Cody actually encouraged me to do that. It got to the point where having three different producers was a lot of input. I’ve always been the songwriter and the tie-breaker in the studio, and just doing that for the record was something we wanted to try out. It was a little nerve wracking and I was a little intimidated by the whole process, but after a few days I got into the swing of things! It ended up being a really fun, cool process.
HMS: I think one of the hardest things about a situation like that is that we humans have an idea of there being an authority over us or a right answer to things, but then suddenly, you’re the authority over your work. Then you begin to understand there are many ways to do things.
WB: That’s kind of the whole idea about our work. With any kind of art, there are no rules. It’s whatever works for you. Sometimes you get into a rut and you have to shake it up a little bit, and that applies to the studio as well. We just got done making a record about a year ago, and it’s in the can. A friend of ours, Jonathan Tyler, helped produce it, and so did Cody. It’s the first time that we’d worked with an outside producer in probably five or six records. We were due for that kind of outside influence. We don’t ever want to change the core of what the band is, but you can’t go in and make the same record over and over. A lot of times some outside ears are a great thing to give you some fresh perspective.
HMS: Do you think there are some new sounds on that album, things that you might not have otherwise done?
WB: It definitely still sounds like a Reckless Kelly record, but it impacted the arrangements and the songs in a way that we wouldn’t have thought of on our own. There are different drum sounds, for example, doing a really dry drum sound. When you’re doing it, it doesn’t seem like a big deal, but when you listen to the final product, you think, “Wow, that really makes a huge difference in the final sound.” It didn’t change the nature of the band, but it definitely changed the sound of the album in a good way.
HMS: Listening to the double-album, something that jumped out to me was just how much of a variety of sounds you all are capable of. That’s not surprising given how long Reckless Kelly has been going, since you need variety to give you inspiration, I’m sure. When you were putting together those albums, were you aware of how diverse it was?
WB: For sure, we’ve always had quite a bit of diversity. That one being a double album was even more so. It wasn’t supposed to be a double album, but that happened organically. It was originally just supposed to be the American Jackpot side. We had the record done and we had five or six extra days booked in the studio. I’d go home and finish songs and bring them back the next day, but all those songs weren’t really in keeping with the theme of the album. They were about relationships and girls.
That’s when I had the idea. We had 16 tracks that turned out great, and 10 were slated for the American Jackpot record, so I said, “Let me write four more about relationships and make a double album.” So we booked another four or five days in the studio, and it became this whole other monster.
HMS: The American Jackpot theme was something that was really relevant to the pandemic period. I think people were talking a lot about nationality and identity. How easy was it for you to say, “I need to sit down and write four songs about relationships, right now!”?
WB: [Laughs] It’s not that easy, but I was actually really lucky that Jeff Crosby is a good buddy of ours. He’s a guitar player, singer, and songwriter. He was on the road with us that summer of 2019 and we’ve written a lot together. He co-wrote three or four of the songs that went on American Girls. Having him around made it easier. Normally, it would have taken me quite a bit longer to come up with really good songs. Usually, if I’m going to put ten songs on a record, I’ll write thirty and throw twenty away! You also can’t have too many songs that sound too similar or one that sticks out.
HMS: Does the theme of American Jackpot stay with you as being relevant now, or does it feel like a particular time in your life represented?
WB: I think it does. I think it’s going to have legs and some longevity. I had actually been working on that concept for a long time and I saved a few songs for that record, knowing that the songs would be on there. I always wanted to write a record of American stories, but not have the songs be about America, or political. There’s a song about my grandpa on there, who was a jack of all trades, and to me, that’s very American. There’s a song about Jackie Robinson that just tells his story. I wanted to have these American themes without having ten songs about wars and politicians. I think, when we started talking about the record, people assumed it would be a political record.
HMS: I’m reminded, when you say that, about the artist Norman Rockwell. He represented America every single time, but he told such different stories.
WB: That’s a great analogy. He’s my mom’s favorite, mine, too.
HMS: I really appreciated that the song “North American Jackpot” is soulful, but not sad. It’s not exactly happy, either. The sound and tone allow some light and shadow.
WB: The idea that we’ve hit the jackpot living in North America in the 21st century makes so much sense because anywhere else in the world is not as good as we have it here, for the most part. We also included struggle in the song and added the part about “planting flags on stolen land” to acknowledge that part of our history. We took a lot of lines from the poem on the Statue of Liberty and themes from that. It’s got a lot of hope to it, but it shows a little bit of the darker sides of American history as well.
HMS: I also really responded to the song “Company of Kings” from that album, too, since it reminded me of a lot of advice from older generations that I wish I’d paid more attention to.
WB: That one, from my perspective, is mostly aimed at Trump supporters. We’ve never played that one live, I think. It’s definitely about Donald Trump, who was president at the time when I wrote it. It was about my utter confusion about what makes him so popular to a large amount of people, and the fact that he was able to pull the wool over peoples’ eyes and convince them that he was on their side. To my mind, he continues to do so, and that’s something I’ll never understand. I don’t know how he successfully manages to convince so many people that he cares about them.
HMS: It’s such a human phenomenon, the cult of personality, but that doesn’t mean we understand how or why it works.
WB: It’s also about the polarization that came along not too long before that, and hopefully that’s something that will correct itself eventually. If you stand back, you can see both sides of it, but it’s kind of crazy how there’s no middle ground anymore, at any level.
