Google the name "Brandon Kinney" on the web and you'll find all sorts of characters: a sci-fi fan in Houston, a scholarship winner in South Dakota, a horse trader in Iowa, a guitar player in Fort Wayne, a wrestler in New York.
"Everybody's tryin' to impersonate me," laments Brandon Kinney in Nashville.
An established songwriter with single cuts that include Lonestar's "You're Like Coming Home," Randy Houser's "Boots On" and album tracks by Willie Nelson and Randy Travis, this Brandon Kinney however does find bits of himself in the others who share his name. Like the Brandon from Iowa, he has an interest in horses. Like the one from Fort Wayne, he plays guitar. And like the one from New York, he's wrestled a time or two.
"But," he cautions, "that's kind of bedroom-personal, if you know what I mean."
No matter how many people share his name, this Brandon Kinney is a one-of-a-kind singer, songwriter, barbecue specialist and working-class joker. His idiosyncratic view of the warped world around him is oddly evident in Smells Like Texas, a debut album with a party atmosphere and a punchline title.
The project is loaded with love-inducing alcohol, a religious kook, a cranky wife, a masculine transvestite, a perpetual lounge lizard, a grandma with a biker boyfriend and a trailer-park beauty who's the 21st century poster child for trashy women. It's a laughable walk on the weird side?country with a twisted smile.
"Well," Kinney shudders, "I think it's serious, the whole album. I'm kind of offended now."
"Redneck, Black Bra, White T-Shirt" celebrates a stunningly dressed babe found after an exhaustive search "from deep in the heart of Texas to the gut of the United States." "Don't Tell Me" lines up TV evangelists, O.J. Simpson, Martha Stewart and "Queer Eye For The Straight Guy," confirming modern American culture as a sign of the apocalypse. "Smoker" turns a backyard barbecue pit into an insatiable object of sexual desire. And "When She Drinks Too Much" recounts a marriage gone sour... whiskey sour, to be specific.
Just for good measure, Kinney throws in "I Need A Beer," the tale of an average Joe who recognizes that the people around him?a transsexual sibling, a weed-smoking grandparent, an incarcerated wife, a mother who's been in a "Girls Gone Wild" video?qualify him for a guest spot on "The Jerry Springer Show."
"All of that stuff, I've seen somewhere in some form, and most of it was in my hometown!" he laughs. "I've derived all of those characters out of real people that I've come in contact with and like I said, some of 'em were my family."
Brandon Kinney is reviving an irreverent form of country that follows in the footsteps of Country Music Hall of Famer Roger Miller: skewed images, offbeat personalities, unpredictable phrasing?enough oddball elements to keep the listener a little off balance, but continuously aware that Kinney doesn't take himself, or the world around him, too seriously. Seriousness is "not in my personality, which is probably not always a great thing," he admits.
Kinney came by that attitude naturally. He grew up in the West Texas town of Lamesa, a spot between Lubbock and Odessa with fewer than 10,000 people where the median home price is still less than $40,000. It's a long drive to anywhere, and for some, humor is the best way to make the most of the uneventful tick of daily life.
"Growin' up, my dad was demented and my cousin was demented, and it was always kinda easy to pull material from them for my songs," he says. "We were just one big jokin' family. That's all we ever did. I think we probably irritated most of the people we ever were around, just because they tried to carry on a serious conversation, and we always turned it around."
Kinney's predilection for country music was also inbred. His parents kept a radio next to his crib tuned to the local country station, mostly so that if friends visited the house, the extra noise wouldn't make the newborn cry. Nonetheless, country was an interesting companion for an impressionable mind, given that it was the mid-'70s and the genre was awash in songs of cheatin', drinkin' and sexual double-entendres.
"It is kind of funny when you think of it that way," Kinney observes.
He was heavily influenced by Roger Miller, John Anderson, Don Williams and John Conlee, particularly drawn to songs with lighter themes or blue-collar subject matter. And in traditional form for the genre, Kinney made his singing debut in a Baptist church, where he often sang "specials" on Sunday nights.
By the time he'd graduated from Lamesa High School, Kinney had begun playing on occasion with older country bands. He went on to Jacksonville Junior College, then transferred to Nashville's Belmont University, noted for its music business program. Lee Ann Womack had made a similar transfer, and many other artists-to-be had found their way to Belmont, including Trisha Yearwood, Josh Turner and Kinney's fellow classmate Brad Paisley.
After graduation, Kinney started a family (son Tate and daughter Nix) and pushed through a series of odd jobs until he landed a songwriting contract with a Nashville publisher. But even as he turned out more traditional songs for other artists, he was tucking away a bevy of squirrelly songs with acerbic viewpoints and nutty storylines. As with most of the stuff in his life, he didn't take them too seriously. But publishing executive Leslie Tomasino did, and she was able to connect Kinney with record producer Mike Clute, known for his work with BlackHawk and Diamond Rio.
In just two days of recording, they knocked out the album that would become Smells Like Texas, its rambunctiousness and lack of pretense illustrated by such titles as "Hicks," "Homie Don't Play That Game" and "She's Gonna Have My Children."
"I don't consider 'em novelty songs," he says. "They're about real life, but laughin' about life mostly."
The lone exception is the closing "Rough Crowd," a spiritually insightful piece about redemption and second chances. Kinney's irreverence disappears in the performance, yielding to appropriate reflection and a sort of casual appreciation.
The album's unrelenting musical skits are likely to wind up as the soundtrack to card games and keggers, a reminder that no work and all play makes Jack a total hoot.
And that's appropriate. This Brandon Kinney might like horses, play the guitar and have a little experience with "bedroom-personal" wrestling, but mostly he just knows how to laugh.
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