NASHVILLE, TN. (Arista Nashville) - First they leapt both Billboard and
Radio & Records Country Singles Chart with "Play Something Country," the raucous manifesto about just what kind of music the boys wanna listen to. Then - faster than you can say "pivot and shoot" -
Brooks & Dunn also top Billboard's Country Album chart with their critically-lauded Hillbilly Deluxe, which sold 111, 377 copies in spite of Hurricane Katrina.
"We worked hard on this record, not that we don't on all of them. This one has fire in it. It takes us from those all-too-familiar beer joints that we cut our teeth in to the front row of church," says rafterscraping powersinger Ronnie Dunn. "I feel like we're barely scratching the surface with the first single 'Play Something Country,' because there's so much more on this record."
In addition to debuting at No 1 on the Country Album chart, Hillbilly Deluxe also enjoys the boys' highest pop debut ever: coming in at No 3 on Billboard's Top 200 behind Kanye West's 900,000+ sophomore release Late Registration and G-Unit's Tony Yayo's Thoughts of a Predicate Felon.
"I knew doing a rap-country song like 'Whiskey Do My Talkin'' was a good move," says Kix Brooks with a big laugh. "It totally opened the urban side of honky tonk up to us, not to mention there being plenty of good old fashioned amped up country on this one."
With Entertainment Weekly hailing the album as "perfectly drawn vignettes of Saturday night sin and swagger" and proclaiming the duo "the premier practitioners of the sawdust serenade," Billboard weighs in with "redneck genius… a big, broad, bold record" and USA Today raves about the pair's, "soulful country…," saying the pair, "up the ante with 'Play Something Country'," Hillbilly Deluxe boldly walks the line between critical mass and commercial muscle. Not that the Tony Brown-produced album - featuring support from Sheryl Crow, Vince Gill, Little Feat's Bill Payne, Joe Ely/John Mellencamp vet David Grissom, Steve Winwood alum Michael Rhodes, Southern California steel stalwart Dan Dugmore and a host of Nashville's finest - started out as a stacked deck.
"This time we decided we wanted to have fun," Brooks explains. "We really wanted to strip it back to the roots of how we got started - and we did some pretty unconventional things, right down to using a couple of my song demos for masters 'cause that's where the performance really had heart. In chasing the music, we found ourselves really turning up the heat - and it was pretty cool. Glad to see a lot of other people thought so, too"
With "Play Something Country" scorching the top of the Billboard and Radio & Records Country Singles chart, Deuces Wild in full rut and the top-selling country album in the nation, 4-time Entertainers of the Year Brooks & Dunn go into the announcements for the "39th Annual Country Music Association Awards" flying high and feeling good! Hillbilly Deluxe, indeed.
