Natural success
The Bros. Landreth on making music honestly
The Bros. Landreth may hail from the wintry wonderland of Winnipeg, but their music has a cultural home in a much warmer climate. The group, which is fronted by brothers Joey and David, showcases effortless harmonies over sweet molasses country dirges on its Juno-winning debut Let It Lie. Despite only joining forces some two years previous, The Bros. have already become rising stars in the folk and country scenes, where their hirsute good looks and musical talent have landed them in Rolling Stone and a strong following across both Canada and the United States. The Post’s Jon Dekel caught up with the band to discover their secret formula to overnight success.
Q It’s unusual I find out about a Canadian group via an American publication. Where did you guys come from?
Joey All four of us started as sidemen. I was coming off a particularly tough tour and Dave was in the middle of a long one and I called him and said, ‘Hey, when you get back in town you want to start writing some songs just for us?” Just cathartic. Now two years later we have a record deal and a Juno under our belt and 200 days on the road. It’s been a really fun, exciting progression because we’ve all worked with people who have slugged it out for years and years and it just doesn’t happen like this. It’s never this easy.
Q So why was it so easy? Joey I think just a couple right
choices at the right time. We just met the right people.
Dave We decided to team up with people who were first and foremost fans of what we were doing, not what we could do.
Q What do you mean by that? Joey Not looking at us with giant dollar signs in their eyes going we can get these guys to play anything we want. Let’s get someone to write them a big song and we’ll have a big country hit! We decided to go with our U.S. label because they said they’d work with the album as is.
Q What did the other labels ask?
Dave We call it the Chicken Fried Complex (after the Zac Brown Band’s huge hit, “Chicken Fried”): we’re a bunch of bearded dudes who have country influences so all we need is one “Chicken Fried” and then, and I quote, “you guys can go back to doing that etherial sh-t you like to do so much.’
Joey When we put the band together we wanted to be more pop influenced but the songs that were coming out were not honest. Our modus operandi has been do what feels right and if it doesn’t, don’t do it.
Q That’s a high level of maturity for such a young group. Do you have any pinch-me moments yet or are you already over the insanity of the industry.
Jay Definitely when we met Bonnie Raitt at the Winnipeg Folk Festival. We finished our set and her tour manager came up and said, ‘Bonnie wants to say hi, is that cool?’ We’re like, ‘of course, that’s cool.’ So she comes up and we exchanged some words and then she said, ‘Hey, you know we’ve all been waiting for you guys.’ And it was like, ‘What?’ And she said, We’ve been waiting for a band of players to just come and play.’ We were just weak in the knees. I could have dropped dead right there.