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Picture it. The year is 2019. Country music is shrugging off the final chrome-plated, beer-scented shackles of bro-country as the genre continues to reel from the effects of Lil Nas X’s wonderfully blasphemous ‘Old Town Road’ and Kacey Musgraves’ psychedelic-country-pop soup, Golden Hour.
It was an interesting time and place to be for any country artist. For longtime country legends, like Kix Brooks and Ronnie Dunn, though, it was even more so.
At this point, the two artists behind the celebrated duo Brooks & Dunn hadn’t released an album in 12 years, not since 2007’s Cowboy Town. Still, their classic songs were being covered left and right, their influence being heralded above most legacy acts. This gave the group’s manager, Clarence Spalding, an idea.
“The concept had nothing to do with us, for real,” Ronnie Dunn tells Holler, remembering the first Reboot collection. However, the Spalding-spawned brainchild was quickly greenlit by Sony Records, and soon, a star-studded compilation of Brooks & Dunn standards was underway.
The Reboot project welcomed some of country music’s hottest acts to reinterpret some of the genre’s most defining hits. A then-burgeoning Luke Combs took on their 1991 opus ‘Brand New Man; Cody Johnson, fresh off a breakthrough, undertook the 2003 ballad ‘Red Dirt Road’; and Kane Brown – at the time, an exciting newcomer – tackled the 2005 tearjerker ‘Believe.’
Reboot wasn’t so much a tribute album as it was a celebration of an act that has come to mean so much to so many. Today, thanks again to another effort from their manager, the duo is revisiting the project once more, releasing Reboot II with a fresh batch of stars. This time, though, the album invites more than just country artists to join in the salute.
Lainey Wilson, Morgan Wallen, Megan Moroney, Jelly Roll, Riley Green, Christone “Kingfish” Ingram, HARDY, Halestorm and many more are walking up to the plate to bat, tackling a treasure trove of country songs alongside the two men who made them standards.
“It was a surprise for us,” Dunn says of the way the Reboot collections have unfolded. This time around, the pair have pushed the limits even further, approaching the project with an anything-goes mindset. As a result, songs like ‘Boot Scootin’ Boogie’, ‘Hard Workin’ Man’ and ‘Hillbilly Deluxe’ meet metal, blues and hard rock influences, making even their most instantly recognizable offerings nearly indiscernible.
“The fans that have been with us along the way, I'm sure it's going to be a shock to some of them,” he adds. But, in reality, the point of Reboot and, now, Reboot II has always been about more than just catering to taste. “The purpose,” Dunn explains, “is just to see what these songs can do and where they can go and have fun at the same time.”
In addition to discussing the latest Reboot, Dunn dissects many of the album’s star-powered collaborations, touches on the country music genre today, and opens up about being considered an inspiration.
On their anything-goes approach to ‘Reboot II’:
“It's so much fun to watch them come in and get to work with them. We're in the studio with them when we do it. Some of them come in, they know exactly how they want to go about it, and then others come in and they'll go, ‘I'm not sure how to approach this,’ and you get to work with them in the studio.
It was ‘Brand New Man’. [Warren Zeiders] got hung up on the chorus, and we all do … For some reason, I said, ‘Dude, you want to lean into it with kind of a Nirvana vibe?’ From the downbeat, they knocked it out of the park.”
On bringing in rock band Halestorm for ‘Boot Scootin’ Boogie’:
“A few years ago, we were sitting around talking about ways to repurpose these songs. We were laughing, and I just brought up the idea jokingly, what would it be like to have Metallica, a metal band, or a hard rock band do ‘Boot Scoot’? I mean, just laughing.
Sure enough, Clarence comes up and says, ‘Halestorm is in town.’ They show up, they have it worked up, and I'm sitting in the studio in awe, going like, ‘This is really not happening.’ They had it worked up, arranged, everything, and hit it and away we went. It is what it is. It's definitely repurposed ‘Boot Scoot’.”
On reworking an iconic song like ‘Neon Moon’:
“Kacey [Musgraves] broke the mold on that. If she was terrified, she sure didn't act like it. She was the only one who came in on Reboot I with her own band and her own definitive idea of how to do the song. And, gosh, I thought it was fabulous.
With Morgan [Wallen], on this record, he said, ‘I was really afraid to stray too far off course from the original’ and did what he did. I like the guitar part … kind of got a little Mexicali vibe. But other than that, we pretty much stayed between the lines.”
On the fluidity of the country music genre today:
“There are really no limitations to what [artists] can do.
Nashville has become a real melting pot, and there's room for growth. We can't continue just to do the same three chords and the truth. At the same time, there's nothing wrong with three chords and the truth, if it's done in a good way.
It's not gonna always resonate with everybody, but if you could maintain a healthy status quo, kudos.”
On being looked to as an inspiration:
“It's kind of hard and weird to accept that role. I'll go as far as to say we've contributed a humble amount of influence. To see new artists come in and treat [our music] with respect and have fun at the same time, and for it to hopefully resonate as a project to people out there, it feels good, but it feels weird.”
For more on Brooks & Dunn, see below:
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