We had the pleasure of chatting to 1/5th of the wonderful Hunter Brothers a couple of weeks back about their latest EP and touring plans! Check it out below!
The EPs been out a few weeks now. It seems to have gone down really well!
Well I hope so! You don’t always see all of the press or everybody’s internal dialogue so to speak, but what people have expressed has been positive so far! We’re grateful for that!
Is there a particular theme around the release? The title kinda ties into the songs all sounding a little different!
Yeah, definitely! I think this was an exploration sonically, of a few different directions. You have five siblings in a band, so to assume everything is gonna be one-sided is definitely not gonna be the case! We do share a lot in common, but there’s definitely the different influences that everyone pulls into the band as well. Our family alone, there’s going to be all kinda of county within that sphere. But then when you look at the world as a whole, or even national landscape, how do you define country? Or story is very country, we come from the middle of nowhere, grew up farming, but we’ve also had people say we look like we’re from New York!
That is definitely a part of the idea there, but also I think it’s a compilation of songs that we’ve been gathering for a period of time. We took a trip down to Nashville in January and started incorporating more things like the fiddle, or different sounds just to continue to evolve in music and enjoy where it’s going. Not just get stuck in the same thing all the time!
What’s the writing process like for you guys? I imagine working with your family you maybe get a little more leeway?
There’s pros and cons to everything. The pro is that you have these different perspectives that have similarities and shared life experiences. When you’re saying certain things the other can quite quickly deduce and understand what you’re saying. But also you need to be able to find those points of difference enough so that you have those unique perspectives while it’s also cohesive as a group. But that’s the case for everything, right? Sometimes when you’re writing with someone new they might see things pretty similarly to you despite just meeting you, they just get you. You develop friendships in Nashville and you tend to go back to those people who creatively you can collaborate with. As siblings, sometimes if you have all of us in a writing room, it’s a lot to process! If you have too many cooks in the kitchen, sometimes it can get a little overwhelming for certain members.
It’s still crazy to me, coming from outside of country, to see the Nashville writing scene. It’s really fascinating!
Yeah it is! No songwriters approaches something exactly the same way as the next one; it’s artistic expression at the end of the day. I think that’s what continued to shift things and mix things up a bit, you get lots of different perspectives. The learning part of it is how do you hold space for three or four peoples opinions at the same time? I think that’s really an art form in of itself. It’s one thing to write something in your notebook by yourself at home but to allow that creativity to be accessible to multiple people and have those collaborations come organically is art.
There’s a couple of collaborations on the EP. How did the Latham one come about?
So that was one of the fun things about this project: we’ve done collaborations but not recently. So with this project as just an EP, we hit two of them! That was fun! The one with Latham, it came about in a bit of a roundabout way, it wasn’t like we knew each other. It was actually one of those things where we needed a specific voice for that part, and we knew one of us were going to be able to pull that off! I am not a rapper! I can spread my wings into R&B and pop, but rap is not one of them! I’m pretty sure I did actually try one time in the studio and it was awful. I’m pretty sure my brother kept that sound bite somewhere for blackmail!
Latham was the option that ended up working out. We can’t tour with him in this next leg of tour but we do have screens so we welcomed him onto the stage the way we could! We didn’t think any of us could pull off that part properly. That’s where the country roots come in, you’ve definitely gotta know when to let someone else take the wheel. I think what’s interesting about that, going back to the title All Kinds of Country, having collaborations on this project was the most relevant time to do so! The title is sharing that it’s for everybody!
I feel like country’s become a lot more broad the last couple of years since it’s taken off again, too. You’ve got the traditional stuff but then you also have country rock making a comeback and more hip-hop infused stuff… there’s everything!
Yeah, totally! and when you ask that question ‘how do you define country’, it’s a pretty open-ended question. Is it the sound? Is it how they present themselves? Is it their story? I do think that when I evaluate that as a whole, storytelling is largely what the genre is about. I think that that’s the theme that continues forward. Music is quite fluid, is a C note a country note? But I think one thing I see is that consistent thread in country is a lot of it is about storytelling, sharing perspective and life experiences. The narrative is incredibly important. And now more than ever people can access others’ lives and see what their background is. But it’s an interesting topic, and I’m quite pleased that ended up being the title of the EP, honestly!
Even just the location! We have plenty of country artists starting up over here. And we still very much associate the genre with the South of the US, but then it’s a massive genre in Canada!
Canada is a large country from a landmass standpoint, but population-wise it’s not that vast, so you get to know the people in the industry. A lot of us are friends with each other and it’s great to watch the growth and progress of each act who’s going through the difficulty of economic times and the touring process just like you! I feel like Canada has multiple different cultures living across each Province even, and that’s interesting as when you’re presenting a show, they maybe interpret it through multiple angles. Music and art is a very interesting field!
In terms of the EP, was it always set to be that length, or is there an album of songs floating around for the future?
Yes, we actually do have other songs that are going to be added to this project. Nowadays when it comes to releases there are so many different ways people do it. Some are releasing music constantly while some are more album specific or there’s EPs, or sometimes when you just feel the moment. Some songs hold relevance at a certain moment in time and you figure out how to package them up later. For us we wanted to release new music that we were preparing and getting ready. Our deadline was to have an EP ready by the time we were touring. Then there are other songs that I’m excited to record that will likely round out the project as a whole, or more this chapter. They have similar directions to them, even if the pieces have different sounds to them. I think the songs that are still to be recorded will flow into a similar space that this project is currently living in.
Have you got much planned in for next year?
There’s some shows that are starting to come on the books. Month to month there’s ones that we have to see if we can make work schedule-wise, we have a lot of moving parts. But yeah, that’s starting to happen, and then new music obviously. I think next year is gonna be a year of creatively exploring that next chapter. When you’re in between touring seasons is when you really get to carve out that creative side of things!
Any plans to come to the UK any times soon?
We’ve had this question multiple times now… I would absolutely love to make that happen! We’ve never played there before so I imagine everyone would absolutely love to. I think it all comes down to timing and opportunities, but honestly I think people from the UK just sound beautiful rich, I always wanted that type of accent! I wanna come hang out with people way cooler than me!
I would love to make the trek out there so hopefully we can make that happen soon!