Brothers Osborne have had a great 2023. They recently celebrated their sixth straight CMA ‘Duo of the Year’ award and released their fabulous, self-titled fourth studio album. Since their last album, the heavier, Southern-rock leaning ‘Skeletons’, John and TJ Osborne’s life has been a whirlwind. TJ came out as gay and John revealed his struggles with depression at the same time as becoming a father of twins!
This turbulence seems to have given them a fresh perspective on life and with their self-titled, fourth album, in itself an explicit message of where they think they are in their careers and who they think they are, Brothers Osborne have made themselves the flag-bearers of defiant, progressive and inclusive Country music, something they refer to themselves as ‘Big Tent Country’, a little bit of everything for everyone. We were thrilled to catch up with TJ Osborne recently to talk all about it.
Thank you for speaking to us today, TJ, we always love touching base with you and John. Congratulations on the CMA award for ‘Duo of the Year’ and keeping your streak going!
Thank you very much, we consider ourselves very fortunate.
What do those awards and accolades mean to you and John?
Probably the same that it does for most musicians I guess in terms of in this industry it’s so hard to have any tangible ways of measuring success beyond money. It’s quite hard to work out if you achieved your goals or not sometimes, right? Everything in this business is so subject to personal opinion.
Sometimes when you try to do something a little more risky it can come without as much support and commerciality and so the pay off for doing something like that can be an award that’s voted for by your peers, which is what these ones are. It’s so great being in receipt of an award that is a stamp of approval from the industry and your peers.
A second congratulations on your new album, which has been out for a little while now. Have you been pleased with the reaction to it?
I have, yes! I intentionally don’t pay a lot of attention to reviews. The very famous manager, Doc McGhee, once said to me that I shouldn’t pay attention to reviews because if you like and believe in the good ones, then you have to believe the bad ones too! (laughing)
From a writing perspective, the songs on our new album are the best that we have written. We changed up our producer on this record and changed up the sound a little. We’ve only played a handful of dates to support the record so far but the songs sound great live too and seem to be going down well and we’re both feeling good about them.
The fact that we won the CMA award and the album has now been nominated for a GRAMMY too is such a huge thrill, it’s a very reassuring thing to experience.
I get the feeling you and John made this album with a real sense of creative confidence and audacious decision making?
We really enjoyed making this album. You can sometimes lose sight of the fact that you are supposed to feel like that when you’re in the studio making music once you’ve been doing this professionally for a number of years! (laughing) Sometimes the business takes over if you are not careful and that becomes distracting to the creative process.
We had to remind ourselves why it is we do this when we set out to make this album. We love music and we want it to be fun too. Everything else should be secondary to those two things when you are making an album, right? We had a great time making this album and it’s something that we’re proud of, because of that.
You’ve always been more interested in making whole albums rather than writing hits and then filling in a long form project around those songs.
Yeah, that’s always been our goal, from the beginning, to create whole projects. That’s one of the reasons why we wanted a shift in producer this time around. We want each record we make to sound individually identifiable and we kinda felt like we had done three records with Jay Joyce, who is an amazing producer, but we felt it was time to move on to a different sonic approach with Mike Elizondo. We wanted to explore different sounds & styles this time around.
Is radio and chart success still important to you or are your aspirations and goals elsewhere now, four albums in?
I’d say they are still important, yes, at least here in the United States. Radio is still extremely important over here however it isn’t our only focus. It never has been, really, and that might be part of the reason why we haven’t had as much success at radio as some of our peers and contemporaries have had. Our main focus has always been ‘what do the fans want?’ We want to make good music, sell tickets and put on a great show, first and foremost.
What we saw, early in our career, was a bunch of fans who were kind of sick and a little jaded about the way things were in the industry and who kinda wanted to hear something different. That’s where our success came from. Do we want radio success? Of course we do but there are so many other avenues to explore that define popularity. I mean, look at TikTok………I’ve kinda turned a corner with that platform now. I don’t particularly love it, it’s a little annoying, personally, to me but it is a free marketing tool! (laughing) I think you really should take everything into consideration when your goal is to get your music to as many people as possible.
Which song took the longest time to get it to the place that you were happy with for the album and which song was the quickest to write?
That’s a good question. Sometimes you get a verse and chorus down and then walk away for a bit, other times the juices are just flowing. I will say that we were writing a song in a session one day and we were about four hours in and hitting resistance at every turn so we went out and took a break, came back in, started something else and all of a sudden we had ‘Nobody’s Nobody,’ which is now our new single over here in the US! That was probably the quickest is terms of something that flowed from beginning to end.
‘Who’s Says You Can’t Have Everything,’ might have been the longest. I wasn’t too sure about it to begin with. It was such a positive idea which is not really our brand, right? (laughing) I kept hearing it and began to be moved by the sentiment of it every time we played or I sang it! I really like it now and it makes me feel something too.
The album closes down with what might be your two most experimental or audacious songs in ‘Ain’t Nobody Got Time For That’ and ‘Rollercoaster’. Was that sequencing deliberate?
Yes, it was. We tend to lean on our manager John Peets for that type of advice, he has a great ear for sequencing. It’s also great to grab the perspective of another trusted person when you are putting something like an album together.
An album is meant to take the listener on a journey, right? At least it used to before the shuffle was invented! Ending this particular journey in such a peaceful way with ‘Rollercoaster’ seemed to be the right thing to do. It felt like a good contrast to ‘Ain’t Nobody Got Time for That,’ that song has everything on it! It has more layers and instruments on it than any other song we have ever recorded so to follow that song with ‘Rollercoaster’, a simple, piano ballad, felt like a good way of ending the record.
Given ‘Ain’t Nobody……’ has got all those layers of multi-instrumentation, will you be able to play it live?
Possibly – we haven’t attempted to do that song live yet because there are so many others that people seem to want to hear ahead of it but I’m sure we’ll be able to work out how to do it somewhere later down the line.
Now you are four studio albums into your career is it getting harder to put a setlist together in terms of songs that you need to start leaving out and not playing?
Yes in a way because fans always have their own favourite songs and the more albums you record the harder it is to live up to those expectations. In some ways, though, it is easier. It gives John and I a bigger deck of cards to play with, which is exciting.
When we play over in Europe, for instance, we’d play some different songs to what we’d focus on over in the States. It’s the same if we are going to play on the west coast or the north west here, where some of our songs go down differently to what they do in other markets. Our die hard fans know everything, so there is no pressure there but a lot of the markets and cities we play in the States mean that we have to focus on the singles and radio songs because that is all a decent amount of people at the show will have heard. You have to figure out how to fill in the blanks there and lean on our more popular songs according to streaming or chart positions.
When we come over to Europe we can play all these other songs that we love that we don’t get to play as much at home and that can be a little more challenging in terms of trying to figure out what those songs are! (laughing) The other challenge, as you record more albums, is to make sure that the band, themselves, know all the possible songs that you might decide to play. Sometimes people will request something from an album like ‘Port Saint Joe’ and we won’t have played the song for years and years! (laughing) That can be fun: it’s a challenge but it forces you to step out there and make a memorable moment for the night that is somewhat off-script! (laughing)
We’re excited to be getting you back in the UK for the C2C festival in March. You have such a strong bond with your European fans – what do you put that down to do you think?
I think, in my personal opinion, that everyone over in the UK appreciates authenticity. People over there like to keep it real and there’s no bullshit – which reflects our own personalities and music too. Our music and the spirit of where we come from is relatable to that. There are a lot of artists in the US where the outside looks good but there’s really no core to them. For us, for better or worse, we are very sure of who we are and we are very strong willed about that and I think the European audiences appreciate the realness of it all – especially seeing as though we live in a world where there’s so much bullshit and made up, contrived things that are pitched to the masses.
John and I have an inability to be anyone else but ourselves and I think the audiences over in the UK and Europe can see that and admire it. There are a lot of artists over here who tend to not be like that, for one reason or another.
I really loved the duet you did with Jillian Jacqueline on her song ‘Better With a Broken Heart’ and I know you had Lee Ann Womack on your debut album but Brothers Osborne haven’t really gone in for duets like other Country artists and I just wanted to explore why that is with you as a closing question.
I always go back on forth on this because it’s always a little challenging doing a duet with a woman considering I’m a gay man. The Jillian Jacqueline song gave me more of a narrator’s perspective which felt appropriate for me to be a part of.
I can see singing with a female singer would bring a level of theatre to a some songs that would elevate them up a level and I really like singing with females a lot too so it might be something we do in the future. The timing of the collaboration with Jillian Jacqueline just fell in a time when we were between records: we have always been big fans of hers, she’s a phenomenal singer and artist and it felt right at the time. I’m sure it will be something John and I figure out and do more of in the future, we’ll see!!!
Check out Brothers Osborne’s new, self-titled album on all the sites and platforms and grab a ticket to see them at the C2C festival in London, Glasgow and Belfast next year right here.
