Reboot II
Album ∙ Country ∙ 2024
Few acts have influenced country music like Brooks & Dunn. The best-selling duo in the genre’s history, Kix Brooks and Ronnie Dunn helped define the ’90s country sound with landmark albums like their 1991 debut Brand New Man and 1993’s Hard Workin’ Man. It’s fitting, then, that the iconic duo would round up some of country and Americana music’s best and brightest artists for this collaborative record, which serves as a sequel to 2019’s Reboot. Where the first Reboot revisited the duo’s biggest hits, Reboot II lets featured artists—including Lainey Wilson, Christone “Kingfish” Ingram, The Cadillac Three, and more—choose deeper cuts, offering a fuller glimpse of the sheer breadth of the pair’s influence.
Brooks tells Apple Music that compiling the project was loose and playful, with each artist free to conceive their track however they chose. “It's just turning everybody loose,” Brooks says. “Bring your own bands if you want. Bring your own producer if you want, whatever studio you want to work in. If you don't want to deal with that, you can use our stuff and we will be there. After that, pick a song and do it however you want.”
Dunn enjoys the record’s break from the traditional album formula and relished the opportunity to reimagine songs that, in many cases, are several decades old. “People don’t like change,” he says. “And even on stage ourselves, if we change a little riff or a turnaround here in the middle of it, you might get a little bit of pushback from the fans, so we always try to adhere to that. Now, we've gone completely the other way with this record and just let the horses run.” Below, Brooks & Dunn share insight into several key tracks.
“Rock My World (Little Country Girl)” (feat. Marcus King)
Dunn: “Marcus is a guitar slinger. He gave that song a totally different vibe, which it was. He’s a legit blues player. Just a guitar slinger. Rips it.”
Brooks: “He came in with his band… I went in his vocal booth and said, ‘Marcus, I don’t want to get in your business or anything, but you know that guitar solo you’re doing is like 16 bars? Would it really [throw] you off if we made that 32 bars?’ He's like, ‘Fricking get out of this room.’ He goes, ‘Boys, we are not doing any Nashville BS now. We are South Carolina kickers. Here we go.’”
“Ain’t Nothing ’Bout You” (feat. Megan Moroney)
Dunn: “Walked in, heard it, you’re expecting something totally different, right? And you hear that vocal coming through there and now you’ve got to go, ‘Oh, I got to go chase that. OK, let's go.’ Megan hits that darn airy voice and it’s like, ‘We’re done here.’”
“Hillbilly Deluxe” (feat. HARDY)
Dunn: “HARDY scared me to death at first, and then I went, ‘That’s maybe one of my favorite tracks. Can’t say that on [the] radio.”
“Brand New Man” (feat. Warren Zeiders)
Dunn: “It was like coming at a new song in a new way and trying to find it in the studio with the players. And the guys that Dann Huff had cast for that [song], it was really cool. We stopped at one point and just said, ‘You know what? Let’s take this chorus.’ And I was trying to read his mind, trying to read him while he was in the studio. I said, ‘What do you think we take this chorus and hit it like a Nirvana vibe?’ And everybody goes, ‘Whoa.’ And it came off, in my opinion, really, really cool.”
Brooks: “There's one change in there that just says Nirvana. The vibe is definitely there.”
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