Brandon Q&A

Sara · Posted: Fri Aug 15, 2008 10:37 am Post subject: Brandon Q&A

From Texas Music Magazine

Quote:

Q&A with Brandon Rhyder
AMANDA PALM

After spending just five minutes with Brandon Rhyder, you start to wonder how he can be so utterly upbeat and positive. He will repeatedly tell you how blessed he is and how grateful he is for those blessings. But blessings only get you so far, and Rhyder’s success on the Texas music scene hasn’t been for lack of effort. After ditching his college degree and the job that went with it, then ditching his full band and going at it alone, Rhyder arrives with his fifth album, Every Night, the anticipated follow-up to 2005’s Conviction. He wrote or co-wrote every song on the record, and it’s not hard to see how he landed a publishing deal with Harlan Howard Publishing in Nashville and on Radney Foster’s radar.

You just completed your first video shoot at Gilley’s in Dallas a couple weeks ago. What was that experience like?

It was a little intimidating at first, but once the cameras got rolling, it worked out really cool. That was the live portion of it (the “story part” was shot at a Houston home). It’s gonna have the live portion coming in and out and then the story part, where me and this girl are saying, “If there was a day to quit, baby this ain’t it.” It’s funny how things just kind of fall together sometimes. You have to work for so much of it, but then you end up running into someone. The director is a high school friend of mine, and we haven’t seen each other or spoken since high school. And now, you know, we just kind of came back into each other’s lives, kind of by mistake. He was like, “You need a video.” And I was like, “Yes, I do.” It worked out perfectly.

How chaotic is it getting ready to release a new album with a new daughter at home?

Well, my son, Dusty is 2 1/2 years old, and that was quite different from Mahala. You know, the first one, everything’s so new and it’s your first child and they’re breakable. You’re afraid and everything just centers around them. I’ve always heard people talk about having a second child and it’s just, they don’t get as many pictures and they kind of just fall in, and that’s exactly right. We’re so much busier now than we were when Dusty was born, and that’s a good thing, to have that problem business wise. Mahala just flew right in and we said, “All right, c’mon girl, let’s go.” It completed me, because that’s my family. With Dusty, we had planned on having another one, and Mahala has definitely completed that puzzle. The hard part is being gone, but the beautiful part is coming home and getting to have those three, four, five days or whatever it is that we get to spend all together, from daylight to dark. I wouldn’t trade that aspect of it. I hate the leaving, but I sure love the coming home.

What was it like having Radney Foster as a producer?

I think this is some of the best, if not the best production he’s done. Everything sounds so full and amazing. From top to bottom, it’s the record I’ve always wanted to make, and I think it also sounds, sonically, the way I’ve always wanted a record to sound. It’s not too polished, but it sounds pretty. That’s key for me, not to overpolish, but to make it sound full. This is my first full effort to work with (Foster) on the production side, and he put everything together perfectly for me. It’s really cool to have someone in your corner like that.

You refer to your music as “ourstream.” Who coined the term?

I did. So many people ask me, what kind of music do we write? What kind of music do we play? Obviously it falls in the country genre, I think, because you just kind of get put somewhere. I think I have country roots, and I’ve always said that and love those country roots. But I never write a song for a specific genre. I write for the moment; I write for the song, what it lends itself to. There are so many different ways of saying what we play. I think we are our own “stream,” and I think that could be mainstream. I really do. If enough people get around us and they give us the opportunity, I think it could be something that’s completely different. I love songwriters who can do their own thing and get away with it. If you can do that and be your own person, then people will gravitate to that. It may take a little bit longer than if you come out and you sound right down the middle, but if you continue to develop your sound and your style, it lends to really beautiful creative work.

How has your approach to touring changed since your last album?

We tour pretty much 49 out of 52 weeks. We actually had a week off just recently, but that doesn’t happen that often. I think the thing is you gotta strike while the iron is hot. We have such a growing fanbase right now, and we want to continue to branch out from that as well. We’re playing dates coming up in New Mexico and Kansas and Oklahoma and places where we’ve never played, and we’re going to continue to do that. I look at it like a pro-football career. We can’t tour 200-something dates a year every year for the rest of our lives, so you gotta go out there, and you gotta make the most of it while you can. You gotta really work it, because there is gonna come a point and time in your life where it slows down. You have to look at other options, what are you gonna do there. And then you fall into people like Walt (Wilkins) and like Radney, who are now looking
at production, and they’re producing records for guys like us who are coming up and are huge fans of theirs. But while we’re getting there right now, we still have so far to go. I started playing guitar 10 years ago, and I started playing out seven years ago, so we’ve come a long way in a short time, but we’ve still got a long way to go.

StephRose · Posted: Sun Aug 17, 2008 10:18 am Post subject: Re: Brandon Q&A

all cool music stuff aside....i love to hear a father talk about his daughter like that, so sweet!

Quote:

Mahala just flew right in and we said, “All right, c’mon girl, let’s go.” It completed me, because that’s my family.

Can't wait for tonight!!

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