“You can’t really retire from this business,” Willy Braun says. “It’s impossible.”
Two years into Reckless Kelly’s three-year plan to retire from touring, the frontman and co-founder of the Texas by way of Idaho band has not wavered in his desire to slow down. But with a brand new album, the appropriately titled The Last Frontier, released last Friday and fresh off a run of high-profile shows co-headlining with Steve Earle while also acting as Earle’s backing band, Reckless is coming to grips with a finish line they’ll never fully cross.
“People can’t wrap their heads around anything other than an all-or-nothing thing,” Willy, who co-founded the band with his brother Cody Braun, tells Rolling Stone. “Retiring from touring is how we always framed it. We’re hearing, ‘I thought you guys were retiring,’ and the answer is, ‘Well, we’re retiring from playing 180 shows a year.’ But we’re still making records, and we’re still gonna play every now and then. We’re not going away. And even if we wanted to, I don’t think we could.”
The Last Frontier is Reckless’s first studio album since the double American Girls/American Jackpot, released in May 2020, was upended almost entirely by the pandemic shutdown — Reckless did not tour the project until June 2021. Last Frontier features 11 tracks, none of which are longer than three minutes. Willy, who wrote or co-wrote every song, sees it as a concept album.
“I’ve had this idea for a while, and I’ve been writing it on the side for several years,” Willy says. “The concept was to just do a record in the style of old-school, Sixties pop songs that all had to fit on a 45 rpm record. They all had to be right at three minutes long.
“I got it in my head that, because everyone’s attention spans are so short these days, it’s hard enough to get them to listen to a whole song, let alone a whole record. So I thought, let’s do all short-and-sweet tunes with short intros. Don’t force it. Get to the chorus. Do short solos, and get the hell out of there in under three minutes.”
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The Austin five-piece is adept at such creative endeavors. Reckless — with Willy as the frontman and on guitar, Cody on fiddle and mandolin, Jay Nazz on drums, bassist Joe Miller, and guitarist Geoff Queen — were founded in 1996, and the band has rarely taken significant time off since. Musically, Reckless embrace challenges. Their first post-pandemic concerts in 2021 featured a slew of guest musicians and were recorded and released as Mega Kelly Live, the band’s third live album.
The Last Frontier was recorded at Arlyn Studios in Austin — “Our home away from home,” Willy says — with Jonathan Tyler co-producing alongside the band. Tyler also played guitar on the record, as did Micky and Gary Braun of Micky and the Motorcars.
The title track, a duet with Kelly Willis, opens with Willy singing over an acoustic guitar before giving way to the full band in a classic two-four country arrangement, with Willis alternating verses, in which both singers lament, “I’ve lost my mind trying to follow your heart.”
“Cody had the idea to make that song a duet,” Willy says. “I immediately thought of Kelly. I knew her voice would fit, and I’ve always wanted an excuse to do a duet with her anyway, because she’s one of our faves.”
On the whole, the album is still the same hick-rock that the Braun brothers honed growing up in Idaho, but the pace of the songs across the board gives it a fresh sound. It’s undeniably Reckless, but undeniably fresh. Cody says the band allocated the bare minimum time in the studio, as opposed to the nearly two months that American Girls/American Jackpot took. Bringing on Tyler was also Cody’s idea, as the two have been frequent co-producers in recent years.
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“I had a really good time working with him,” Cody says, “and suggested to Willy that we bring him on for this record, just to have some different mojo going on.”
The album opens with “Keep Lookin’ Down the Road,” which was released this summer as the first single. It’s a stay-focused song that Willy and Gary Braun co-wrote with Jeff Crosby. They did not set out to write a biographical tune, but Willy recognizes that it ended up that way. “It became this sort of ‘reflect on the past while having an optimistic look toward the future’ theme, which inadvertently became the story of Reckless Kelly this year.”
The last track is “Lightning in a Bottle,” which Willy wrote as a tribute to his friend and musical mentor, Pinto Bennett. Bennett was a prolific songwriter and torchbearer of a circuit full of roadside dance halls that created a self-sustaining music scene in the Mountain West in the 1970s and 1980s. Bennett never saw mainstream success — though he and his band, the Famous Motel Cowboys, had a brief run of popularity in Europe in the late 1980s — but became something of a regional icon in and around Idaho. He was heavily influential on the Braun family, and Reckless’s 2010 album, Somewhere in Time, consisted entirely of Bennett songs. After a string of health problems late in his life, including a heart attack and Covid-19, Bennett died in June 2021. Braun wrote “Lighting in a Bottle” the day he learned of Bennett’s passing.
“When Pinto died, Crosby called me with the bad news,” Willy says. “I don’t remember what time it was, but I may have had a couple of cocktails. I wrote that tune the same night. And then — I don’t know if I should tell everybody this, but maybe the cat’s already out of the bag — I woke up the next morning, and I kind of don’t remember writing it.
“I had just got all banged up, but I had even made a demo of it. So, I listened and remembered how it went, and I just went, ‘Shit! That’s not bad!’ It was just a tip of the cap to Pinto.”
In the background of the song, you can hear Willy sing, “Tonight I’ll ride away,” a nod to the Roy Orbison song of the same name that Willy says Bennett loved to play.
Reckless have a handful of shows left in 2024, plus featured slots in January at the MusicFest at Steamboat and the Mile 0 Festival in Key West. At the latter, they’ll once again back Earle. Cody says the band’s 2025 plans include hitting a large swath of the eastern United States, which they have yet to tour since announcing their plans to ease up on the road life.
In the meantime, Willy has some solo projects on the back burner, and Cody is splitting his non-Reckless time between studio work and an Austin-based supergroup of sorts. Scattered and Shattered features Braun as well as Bill Whitbeck, formerly of Robert Earl Keen’s band, along with Austin mainstay Kym Warner. Nazz, the third founding member of Reckless who is still in the band today, has started managing artists, and his roster includes Ellis Bullard and Kenny Feidler. Whatever “retirement” ultimately means for Reckless, it will not entail gold watches and porch swings for a long time.
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“Regardless of how things end up or turn out down the road, there is the reality that this is going to be the last time we are playing some of these places,” Cody says. “We don’t really have a plan or know what the future is going to hold, but it’s most likely going to be something different than it’s been for the last 20-plus years.”
Josh Crutchmer is a journalist and author whose third book, Red Dirt Unplugged, is set for release on December 13, 2024, via Back Lounge Publishing, and available for pre-order.