Being Good At Your Craft: The Bros. Landreth Part I – For those who’ve never heard the Bros. Landreth, cue up their music on your streaming service, hit play, and return to this article.
It’s ok. We’ll wait.
Listening to their music, with its excellent playing, stellar harmonies, and fantastic songwriting, one would say (and we hope you agree), “These guys are good!”
As it turns out, the various ways that the word “good” can be applied in the music industry are part of the mindset that helped propel them from hired-gun musicians to one of the best bands in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada.
Their attitudes and philosophies toward success in the industry serve as a lesson to aspiring musicians who want to take their shot. David and Joey Landreth recently sat down with Heartelier.de to talk about some of the experiences that helped bring them to where they are.
Where Has Germany Seen These Lads Before?
The Bros. Landreth’s sound, a contemporary version of Roots and Americana music marked by great playing and songwriting, has garnered them an international audience, touring extensively around North America and Europe since they formed in 2011. Germany seems to regularly find its way onto their itinerary, landing on stages in places such as Klon, Hamburg and Hannover.
We’ve done a fair amount of touring in Germany over the last few years, including my first solo tour in 2018. It’s a place we love to go and play shows. The people are great music fans there, and they’re brilliant crowds. It’s one of our favourite places to play. – Joey Landreth
Equally impressive to them is the musical shifts within a particular country, let alone the rest of Europe. Being from Canada, David says the musical experience changes every two hours down the highway, and shifts in geography impact the kind of audience you get. As they observed, a city such as Berlin will have particular access to music and shows (especially as a musical hub) and a particular kind of audience. Take the band a couple of hours to another area to perform, and there will be a difference in the type of audience you get, though no less enthusiastic.
With the milestones they’ve hit, one doesn’t simply get there overnight; any musician knows that the key to getting a shot is one of the first definitions of “good” one needs to know…
Being Good At Your Craft
Being surrounded by music since their early years (their father Wally was a well-reputed musician, and their mother Darci was as big a music fan as you can get), it seemed inevitable that both Joey and David would find their paths towards being musicians. With this love for the art form, the first aspect of “good” is being good at their instruments. Both brothers wanted to be good, and they cared about that aspect immensely:
“I think what worked for both of us was just working hard, spending a lot of time focusing on the various things that we thought would help us be better players, better working musicians.” – David Landreth.
The dedication to their craft and positive attitudes when stepping into new and exciting musical situations made both brothers the ideal hired gun musicians, who spent a few years working separately on different projects. Working for other artists and watching the comings and goings around touring life was nothing if not informative to both Joey and David, gaining knowledge and experience along the way:
“Whatever early success we had is like working musicians came from just giving a shit about being really good at playing our instruments as well as we could and having great attitudes and showing up eager and excited to play new types of music, being really open to playing a wide variety of music, and stepping into uncomfortable situations with a good attitude. We’ve always returned that ethos of being working musicians to our band.”
And I think that’s why our band sounds like a band. It’s because we’ve never stopped caring about playing and singing really well, and bringing those kinds of attitudes into our music.” – David Landreth.
“I think doing all that side person work kind of helped us frame some ideas of ‘we didn’t necessarily know exactly what we wanted to do [when starting The Bros. Landreth], but we did know some of the things that we wanted to avoid.’ That kind of gave us a leg up.” – Joey Landreth.
The good working musician ethic permeates throughout their debut album, Let It Lie (initially released in 2013). Featuring 11 original songs (the only 11 they had when they crossed paths with Bonnie Raitt, but that’s for another day), the years spent working on their craft can be heard in the production, arrangements and performances. The album helped propel the band into public consciousness and earned the brothers their first Juno Award (the Canadian equivalent to the Grammy Awards in the United States).
There are more ways than one to be good in this business, though being good at what you do certainly doesn’t hurt. There are other ways that the Bros. Landreth have practiced all things good in their careers, but we’ll save some of those, dear reader, for Part II.
About The Author
Kevin Daoust is a guitarist, guitar educator and writer based in Gatineau, Quebec,
Canada. When not tracking guitars for artists around the world, or writing music-related
articles around the internet, he can be seen on stage with Accordion-Funk legends Hey,
Wow, the acoustic duo Chanté et Kev, as well as a hired gun guitarist around Quebec and Ontario. He holds a Bachelor of Music in Guitar Performance from Carleton University in
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.
