Interview: Brooks & Dunn

When Brooks & Dunn saddled up for what they billed as their “Last Rodeo” farewell tour in 2010, they really meant it as a final goodbye.

But this summer the duo is back together for their third straight summer tour and very much sounding like this Brooks & Dunn thing will be an ongoing venture for the foreseeable future.

And in a mid-April phone interview Kix Brooks credited the duo’s fan base for making Brooks & Dunn something he and Ronnie Dunn are excited to do again.

“It's not just the folks that have been paying our rent for 30 years, but we’ve got a whole new bunch of fans that are bringing a lot of energy to the shows,” Brooks said in a mid-April phone interview. “That whole room is awake and it's putting fire into me and Ronnie Dunn and now we walk out there it's not like ‘Here we go again.’ It’s like this is going to be fun and that's what as an entertainer you want to feel when you're walking out on stage. And it doesn't feel tired to me. Even though we played these songs so many times it just doesn't feel tired. And there was a place where, even with new music out there, it was feeling tired to us. The redundance of just going out and doing it night after night was maybe wearing us down. But right now it's really fun. It is, like Ronnie said the other night, this is about as much fun as we've ever had doing this.

“We've gotten to a place where we're really comfortable on stage. We're slinging it hard and it's good,” he added. “I feel like we have a great band and Ronnie and I, I wish to hell I'd been singing this well there in the thick of our career. I was really learning how to sing on stage even though I'd sung in a million bars. I was just screaming my way through it. That doesn't get it when you actually do hit the big time. And now I've kind of learned to breathe, learned to sing over time, and I go on stage with some confidence that at least I can do my part and do it well.”

Brooks & Dunn initially got coaxed back into action when they were offered an opportunity to do a residency in 2015 with Reba McEntire in Las Vegas. It was a familiar pairing, as Brook & Dunn had collaborated with McEntire on the 1998 hit ballad, “If You See Him/If You See Her,” and the subsequent tours they did together did big business. That popularity translated to the Vegas residency.

“We did 105 shows together, as you know, in Las Vegas,” Brooks said. “That was a real fun few years together and I think we all got to the point that we felt like well, we worked Vegas pretty hard and I think Ronnie and I during that time started talking about, you know, I wonder where we could tour? How much we’d want to…Ronnie and I just kind of rolled back into, you know, we ought to put another tour together. Let’s go do this.”

As Brooks & Dunn got back in the swing of performing, they were getting indications that their popularity had not waned in dozen years since their most recent album, 2007’s “Cowboy Town.”

And that notion was confirmed with Brooks & Dunn made the 2019 album “Reboot,” a collection of 12 hits from across their career, re-recorded with a host of current rising stars from the country scene, including Luke Combs (on “Brand New Man,” which was the title track of Brooks & Dunn’s 1991 debut album and the duo’s first chart-topping single), Thomas Rhett (on “My Maria”), Kane Brown (on “Believe”) and Kacey Musgraves (on “Neon Moon”).

The project came about after Combs had posted a version of “Brand New Man” and Musgraves had covered “Neon Moon” and the duo had heard about a number of other newer artists who cited Brooks & Dunn as influences. The duo’s manager suggested seeing if some of the artists would want to collaborate on new recordings of some Brooks & Dunn hits.

“We threw a record together just not even trying,” Brooks said. “It was like it just came together so effortlessly and with a lot of joy in the studio. The whole thing was just, we walked away from that going man, that was fun.”

“Reboot” topped the “Billboard” magazine country album chart and set the stage for Brooks & Dunn’s return to nationwide touring.

A run of about 20 shows was planned for 2021, but the COVID pandemic forced that initial tour to be pushed back until the following year. A similar run of shows followed in summer 2023, and now Brooks & Dunn will play another two dozen dates before wrapping up the “Reboot 2024” tour in August.

During their initial run together, Brooks and Dunn helped transform the country concert experience, bringing the kind of elaborate stage sets and visual production that was already common in the rock world into their shows.

So it’s no surprise that this summer’s tour will boast its share of eye candy for fans.

“We have a giant, giant Tron and we've worked, well, really hard on content and whatever for that and I think it's cool,” Brooks said. “It's hard not to turn around during the show and catch some of that. But anyway, I think hopefully fans will be impressed by some of the visuals, and it's always good to get the right thing that kind of kind of helps to rock the music along, too.”

But Brooks emphasized that fans come first and foremost to hear the music. And this was true even when Brooks & Dunn kept upping the ante during the 1990s and the 2000s on the visual side of their shows.

“Even back then, Ronnie and I, as much fun as we were having doing crazy stuff like that, we always questioned each other about what's our legacy going to be?” he said. “Is all this nonsense going to ultimately take away from why we really came here and what we really care about, which always honestly was the music. But fortunately, I guess we have survived, at least at this point.”

Survived and then some. With more No. 1 hits than the duo can fit into a concert and a rocking country sound that provided a template for a host of country acts that have followed the duo onto the country scene, Brooks & Dunn’s place in country music’s history is secure. And the shows this summer figure to include a good number of the chart-topping hits, as well as some selections fans might not expect.

“It's a pretty good mixed bag, but it's not all just the obvious kind of, I guess, standards for us,” Brooks said. “We definitely do pull some deep cuts off of albums and things like that that people seem to still be singing the words to. So it's fun.”