Ronnie Dunn says picking songs for the next Brooks & Dunn album is a real tug of war. “We’re compromising right now. We’re working on a new record,” he told David Begnaud of CBS Mornings this fall. “I want all my songs on there, he wants all his songs on there.”
Kix Brooks sees it the same way. “We both realize down deep, that song I wrote is better than that song I wrote,” he said. “So you have to be honest with yourself and then at some point, we gotta be honest with each other.”
It will be their first album of new songs since “Cowboy Town” in 2007. CBS Mornings shared Begnaud’s backstage visit with the best-selling duo in country music history.
Brooks & Dunn talk friendship and the road with CBS’s David Begnaud
It all goes back to one lunch in 1990.
Kix, from Shreveport, La., had already written hits for other acts, like John Conlee’s “I’m Only in It for the Love” and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s “Modern Day Romance.” Ronnie, from Coleman, Texas, had put out a few singles on a small label. Then he won a Marlboro talent contest, and the prize was a recording session in Nashville.
Producer Scott Hendricks passed Ronnie’s tape to Tim DuBois, who was building a new Nashville label for Arista Records with Clive Davis. DuBois liked what he heard. At the start of 1990, he invited Ronnie and Kix to lunch and suggested they team up.
“We were kind of tricked by Tim DuBois,” Ronnie said in 2021 on Apple Music Country’s “I Miss… 90s Country Radio” with Nick Hoffman. “I don’t know if he even knew what he was up to when he introduced us.”
Kix wasn’t sold either. “I think we were both pretty skeptical of the idea,” he said. “We both had kind of record deals that didn’t pan out to be much.” In the end, he figured “you got nothing to lose. So we said, okay.”
DuBois kept the request simple. “Just see if you can write a couple songs together,” Kix remembered him saying in a talk with Songwriter Universe. “We didn’t even know each other when we met.”
Ronnie walked in with half an idea. “I had this song idea called ‘I’m a Changed Man.’ Nothing beyond that,” he told Wide Open Country in 2022. He and Kix sat down with songwriter Don Cook, and Kix had a better title. “Then Kix goes, ‘How about Brand New Man?'” Ronnie said. “I said, ‘Okay, let’s go there and see what happens.'”
They wrote the chorus first, which Ronnie says almost never happens. “So we wrote it, recorded it the next day.”
That same week they also wrote “My Next Broken Heart.” Both songs went to No. 1. “Then I met Ronnie on a Tuesday, and we wrote our first two number ones that same week,” Kix said. On Apple Music Country he put it even more plainly: “We screwed up that week and wrote what became our first two number one songs.”
“Brand New Man” came out in June 1991 as their very first single. Ronnie had also written “Neon Moon” and “Boot Scootin’ Boogie” before he met Kix. All four landed on their debut album that August, and all four topped the chart.
They still didn’t expect it to last. At CMA Fest, Ronnie told ESPN’s Marty Smith and Ryan McGee about their three-year plan. “We were like, ‘We’d never make it three years.'” The CMA posted their sit-down.
Kix and Ronnie look back on how they were put together
Here is the original video for the song from that first week.
The first Brooks & Dunn single, in its original video
The “Brand New Man” album just came out on vinyl for the first time, for its 35th anniversary. “When we released BRAND NEW MAN, we were two songwriters trying to make the best record we could,” Kix said. Thirty-six years after that lunch, they are back in a room, each still pushing for his own songs.