Brothers Osborne on who’s welcome in country music
For John and TJ Osborne, work and family have long been intertwined.
Today the siblings are known to country music fans as Brothers Osborne, the rock-leaning twosome that’s put 13 songs on Billboard’s Country Airplay chart and been named vocal duo of the year half a dozen times at the annual CMA Awards. Before they moved to Nashville, though, the brothers grew up helping out with their dad’s plumbing business in the late 1990s in the small fishing town of Deale, Md.
“You know how every country star opens a bar in Nashville?” John asks. “I was thinking it’d be funny to start a Brothers Osborne plumbing company that services all the bars.”
With TJ on lead vocals and John on lead guitar, the brothers look back at those early days in Deale on their nostalgic new album, “Watertown,” which came out last week, 10 years after the release of their first LP. It’s got handsome, well-drawn songs about long-lost loves and teenage indiscretions, not to mention one tune about some of the colorful Osbornes who don’t play in the band.
“We got a mama that you wouldn’t want to take home to mama,” TJ sings in “Family Business,” which rhymes that line with “Got a daddy with a girlfriend who loves marijuana” and “Sister took a swing at her first boy’s father.”
“I always tell people that TJ and I are the most boring people in our family,” John says. “Our sister really did punch her ex-husband in the face.”
TJ, 41, calls the album a tribute to the people who shaped him and his brother, who’s 44. “When you’re a kid, you want to run away from home and spread your wings,” the singer says. “Then at some point, it’s like that place is almost calling you back.”
That the Osbornes are at an age to memorialize the old days puts them on the outskirts, to some extent, of a country scene crowded with ascendant zoomers like Ella Langley, Tucker Wetmore and Megan Moroney. Yet the brothers are hardly fuddy-duddys: In 2021, TJ became the first country artist signed to a major label to come out as gay; musically, he and John consistently make unexpected stylistic choices — take the ringing new wave guitars in “Family Business” — even as they court down-the-middle success, as with the new album’s lead single, “Born and Raised Hell,” which features the country radio kingpin Cody Johnson.
“John and TJ don’t make corporate country music,” says Ashley McBryde, who’s collaborated repeatedly with the brothers. McBryde calls John “a guitar god” and says TJ’s deep voice “could make your kneecaps come unglued”; she adds that she likes to listen to their records “while I’m doing yard work, slinging a chainsaw.”
“Our mission the whole time has been: How do we thread the needle of doing something that’s a little left of center while making it commercial enough that people can hear it?” TJ says over coffee at an outdoor cafe in Griffith Park. The Osbornes are in town on a recent afternoon between tour dates; last night they did dinner at Nobu in West Hollywood — “bougie as f—,” John acknowledges — then “climbed up the La Cienega mountain,” as the guitarist puts it, back to their hotel on Sunset.
“The last 50 yards, I felt like I was gonna puke,” John says.
Does Nashville have good sushi?
“They do now,” John replies. “Back in the day, there was just this place Ken’s — kind of a hole in the wall where you’d get these huge styrofoam containers of rolls. It was really cheap, and we’d all get really stoned and eat tons of sushi.”
The brothers learned to play from their dad in Maryland in a family roots-music combo called Deuce and a Quarter; each went to Nashville to do his own thing but didn’t really gain any traction until they teamed up — a union they say their mother envisioned from the jump.
“I think the second TJ was born, she thought to herself: I have a country band on my hands,” John says. “She’s very — what’s the word I want to use? — goal-driven, in a good way. So when we finally joined forces and things started taking off, there was a bit of ‘I told you so’ about it.” He laughs. “In her defense, she was right.” (The brothers’ sister Natalie also works in Nashville as an A&R exec at the indie label Leo33, where she signed Zach Top.)
Brothers Osborne — nominated again for vocal duo of the year at next month’s CMAs ceremony — came up in a tightknit peer group that also included McBryde, Maren Morris and Kacey Musgraves. The duo broke out with a No. 1 showing for “Stay a Little Longer,” a single from their platinum 2016 debut; since then they’ve scored hits with tunes with like “21 Summer,” “Nobody’s Nobody” and “Burning Man,” the last a collab with Dierks Bentley that also went to No. 1.
Asked why they’ve been embraced by the traditional Nashville biz in a way that’s sometimes eluded Musgraves, TJ shakes his head. “There’s so many Kacey songs that I’m just like, How was this not a huge hit for her?” he says. “There is a game you have to play with country radio — doing things for them that we were willing to do that I know Kacey was just like, ‘No thanks.’”
Why does he reckon he and his brother were willing to jump through the hoops?
“I mean, we knew it would help,” he says. “We grew up in a poor family where everyone worked their asses off just to get by paycheck to paycheck. So I think for us it was about the fact that we’re gonna put in the work and get noticed.”
“You have to be willing to compromise — not your art or your dignity but compromise your time,” John says, “in the hopes that you can pursue a career in music because it’s very competitive.”
Over the past few years, some of Nashville’s biggest hits have come from outsiders like Post Malone experimenting with country music. Speaking broadly, TJ says the trendiness of the genre “is a little annoying because people are like, ‘I hate all country music,’ until their career flounders and suddenly they do a country record. Some of these people, they don’t know anything about it.
“At the same time, the genre is the biggest it’s ever been, which probably set the stage for a song like ‘Choosin’ Texas’ to be the song that it was,” he adds of Langley’s pedal-steel-soaked mega-smash, which just logged its 25th week atop Billboard’s Hot 100 — longer than any other song in chart history.
“I was just up in Brooklyn at a gay bar, and I’m like, All the gays are singing along — what the f—?” TJ says. “Also very jealous of that. I want a song all the gays are singing.”
Five years after he came out in a widely publicized Time magazine story, TJ says he doesn’t think much about his position as one of the few openly gay men in country music. As we keep talking, though, some things seem to come to mind.
“There was a moment recently with all the equity and inclusion stuff where [my identity] started to feel political — that was weird,” he says. “It felt like picking sides, even though I’m like, This is just my sexuality. But I feel like we’re kind of getting back out of that a bit.”
Then again, TJ recalls his appearance at May’s ACM Awards, where he presented Langley with the prize for female artist of the year. “I made a joke about my gay ass being up here giving this award, and there were comments from people being like, ‘I don’t understand why you have to talk about it,’” he says. “It’s like, F—, maybe people aren’t as open to it as I thought. It was proof to me that there’s still a lot of ground to cover.”
Is TJ up for doing the work of opening minds?
“I am. And I think it’s important work because there’s so many different types of gay people. There’s also so many different types of rural Americans. We’ll go to some places, and there are people who I perceive to maybe have some sort of bigotry towards me but I read them wrong and they’re actually totally cool.
“Look, you’re not gonna be able to convince everybody,” he adds. “There’s people that just hate on people for the stupidest reasons. Girls have it the worst. Anytime a girl does anything — ‘She looks like a slut,’ ‘She’s fat,’ ‘She’s too skinny.’ There’s just some mean people out there.”
“We’ve heard it all,” John says.
“There was this amazing burn we got one time where we’d taken ‘21 Summer’ out of the set,” TJ says, “and someone commented, ‘I can’t believe Brothers Osborne played 21 guitar solos but not ‘21 Summer.’” He laughs. “See, at least that’s pretty clever.”
