Brothers Osborne Want to Bring Guitar Heroes Back to Nashville

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Brothers Osborne broke an unspoken rule at a recent songwriters round — a show where groups of writers take turns singing their songs in their most unadorned forms, spotlighting the lyrics and melody. But when the duo performed its hit “Stay a Little Longer,” singer T.J. Osborne reached the end of the final chorus and tilted his head toward his older brother John, who promptly went into a rhapsodic acoustic guitar solo.

Besides showcasing some of the best-known entries in their catalogs, the participants in this songwriters round, a charity event called The First and the Worst, were asked to share some of their greenest, most embarrassing output for the audience’s amusement. So the Osbornes offered “Don’t Bring the Redneck Out in Me,” a song that reeled off rowdy, boastful good ol’ boy stereotypes. Midway through a line about having three children and a wife, T.J., 33 and lanky with a long face and combed-back hair, paused to wryly point out that at 16, this was what he’d thought country songs were supposed to be like.

The day before, at a taco shop the brothers frequent when they’re not on the road, John, 35 and sporting a bushy red beard with a ball cap over his shaggy mane, joked that “Don’t Bring the Redneck Out in Me” was “the first official song we wrote that we thought, yeah, we’ve got it all figured out.”

Back then, the Osbornes naively assumed that copying country’s familiar templates might get them somewhere. Later, they concluded that it was far more important, and satisfying, to commit to a musical identity they could inhabit convincingly. The one they chose — a groove-driven, occasionally jammy singing-and-shredding duo — has made for a rather exotic presence in contemporary country over the past half-decade. Guitar heroes have receded from the spotlight, and even in Nashville, once nicknamed Guitar Town, studio production is frequently powered by drum machines, programming and synthesizers.

“We really wanted to drive that into people’s minds really early in our career that John isn’t holding a guitar so that we can call ourselves a duo,” T.J. said. “He literally is every bit of another singer in the group, with his hands.”

The contrast between the beat-driven trend and the Osbornes’ approach proved an obstacle at first but eventually became an asset. The perception that country music had become too reliant on just one thing — “bro country” — brought on a gentle loosening of the format, demonstrated by the breakthrough of country-soul belter Chris Stapleton. The brothers started accumulating modest chart successes and Country Music Association trophies on the strength of their 2016 debut. Having gotten Nashville’s attention, they went to a sleepy, coastal town in the Florida Panhandle to record an invigoratingly footloose follow-up, “Port Saint Joe,” to be released April 20.

The location reminded the brothers a bit of their Chesapeake Bay hometown, the blue-collar hamlet of Deale, Maryland. Many of its residents eked out livings on the water, but for the Osbornes — described by T.J. as “the only liberal family that I can think of in our town” — plumbing was the family business. “We’d be crawling under houses,” John said, “and if you needed pipes, fittings or tools, we were the ones that would crawl out and go get them and bring them back. We did that ever since we were little kids.”

Their parents wrote country songs on the side and made trips to Nashville, taking notes on what it took to hold down a honky-tonk gig. They returned home convinced that the family band, Deuce and a Quarter, featuring John Osborne Sr. and his teenage sons, needed to work up a four-hour set.

John and T.J., given identical first and middle names in reverse order (John Thomas and Thomas John), learned chords so they could join in at relatives’ picking parties. John developed into a full-blown guitar geek, spending endless hours dissecting Lynyrd Skynyrd, the Allman Brothers, Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton in the bedroom he and T.J. shared. With five children in the family, money was tight. Still, their dad managed to assemble a reel-to-reel recording rig in a shed in the backyard.

First John, then T.J. moved to Nashville after high school, envisioning separate musical paths. “All I wanted to do was grow up, be in a band, play songs that I think are great and get to play guitar solos,” John said. T.J. sang on demos and tried to find his footing as a solo act. But he received the greatest response when his brother accompanied him. “There was something there that we didn’t notice because we had been around it our whole lives,” he said. “It didn’t seem like it was anything unique. But people just kept commenting on it.”

They were part of a circle of open-minded singers, songwriters and musicians that included Kacey Musgraves, Charlie Worsham, Kree Harrison and Lucie Silvas, whom John eventually married. “They were some of the first friends I had when I moved to town,” Musgraves said of the brothers in an email. Before long, she and they had record deals. “John and T.J. stick to what they think is good,” she added, “not what they think will get played” on radio. People occasionally confused the Brothers Osborne with the Osborne Brothers, who’d made their mark in the 1960s and ‘70s. A radio station intern once welcomed the younger Osbornes with a banner depicting the elder pair. John and T.J. found it hilarious, adding a funky cover of the bluegrass legends’ “Rocky Top” to their set. But it was harder to maintain a sanguine attitude about bro country songs leaving room for little else on country playlists.

“We were watching artists that were getting signed a year or two years after us just fly by us on the charts,” T.J. said.

After self-producing an EP, the brothers made their debut album, “Pawn Shop,” with the producer Jay Joyce. Known for his adventurous angle on record-making, he pushed John for gutsier performances.

“A lot of people come through this sort of Music Row school, and it’s full of great players and everybody gets honed in on this thing,” Joyce said in a phone interview. “If they can just transcend and stop thinking, that’s when it gets great.”

The brothers have leaned heavily on live shows to build their audience, recalling the days when guitar-driven country groups shared sensibilities with longhaired Southern rock bands. They’ve opened arena dates for country superstars and headlined club tours but also ventured into territory more associated with jam bands: landing a Bonnaroo booking, playing the main stage at a festival headlined by Gregg Allman and warming up for the Tedeschi Trucks Band at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville. “The conversation was, ‘Is there a country band that we can think of that this crowd would really appreciate, that can hold their own on that stage with Tedeschi Trucks?'” the concert promoter Jason Zink said. “That’s how we came to Brothers Osborne, because they’re not your average country band.” The fans who’d shown up to hear bluesy improvisation gave the Osbornes a standing ovation. “It was like, ‘Well, I guess they got it,'” Zink said.

It was Joyce who suggested the band members haul their gear down to his Florida beach house to clear their heads and record new music. “It just seemed like the best thing for those guys, because they were having a little success,” he said. “Honestly, we got lucky, because it wound up working way better than any of us thought.”

The results of the distraction-free, two-week excursion capture a band breathing easily. Joyce supplied simmering organ parts and other textures, but the brothers and their bassist, Peter Sternberg, and drummer, Adam Box, handled pretty much everything else, laying down sinuous arrangements and patient, viscous grooves.

T.J. Osborne isn’t much for enunciating. He drawls and croons in a guttural timbre, his delivery mischievous, sensual or moony, but always thoroughly relaxed. When he’d flub a lyric or fudge a note, Joyce would often insist on keeping the mistakes. The same went for John Osborne’s playing.

The Osbornes, who wrote all of the songs with Nashville collaborators including Kendell Marvel, Travis Meadows and Shane McAnally, relish tweaking traditional country idioms. They riff nimbly on the Jerry Reed country-funk novelty “When You’re Hot, You’re Hot.” A tune called “Weed, Whiskey and Willie” could have amounted to boilerplate outlaw-anthem fare, but they took it to a pensive place: “My vices and heroes will hold me together while I’m letting you go.”

In and beyond their music, the Osbornes are focused on reuniting blue-collar class consciousness with a socially tolerant outlook. They’ve made cracks about living on little in their songs, and supported the Women’s March, immigrants’ rights and same-sex marriage in Twitter posts.

T.J. Osborne said that it was an honor to take part in the Grammys’ musical remembrance of the victims of the massacre at last year’s Route 91 Harvest festival in Las Vegas. But it disappointed him that the issue of gun control went unaddressed. “I wish it said a little bit more, personally,” he said.

If the Osbornes seem less burdened by fears of blowback than many of their country peers, it has everything to do with the fact that their aspirations are simultaneously sweeping and humble.

“If you threaten me, ‘We’ll do to you guys what we did to the Dixie Chicks,’ it’s like, ‘What are you talking about?'” T.J. said with a crooked grin. “I love playing music, and I want to do it for the rest of my life, but I don’t play music so I can be rich and famous. I play it because I like playing music — and I can be a plumber and play music, too.”