Micky Braun is finding no lack of songwriting inspiration, even after more than two decades fronting a relentlessly independent country band. Time to act on that inspiration, though, is another story. “I got a lot more songwriting books that have notes than I do that have full songs,” the Micky and the Motorcars co-founder tells Rolling Stone.
Micky’s older brother, Gary, on the other hand, has just hit his stride as a writer, to the point that half of the 10 tracks on the Motorcars’ self-titled eighth studio album, out now, are written or co-written by Gary. It’s a far cry from the Motorcars’ 2002 beginnings, when Micky wrote and sang nearly every song the band released while Gary played rhythm guitar.
“I didn’t start out writing,” Gary Braun explains, “but as I started writing more, I wanted to use my songs too. If I’m gonna do this for another 20 years, then I want to be a bigger part of it.”
Micky and the Motorcars is the five-piece Austin outfit’s first record since 2019’s Long Time Comin’ — produced by the late Keith Gattis. Micky wrote most of the songs on that record, but the Gary-penned “Stranger Tonight” became the album’s signature tune and reached the top five on the Texas radio airplay charts. When the time came to record the new LP, Gary’s equal partnership on the composing side was fully established.
“Gary’s writing a lot more, and he’s writing really good songs,” Micky says. “He’s breaking off, doing a lot of co-writes. It helps me out a lot. He had a few songs on the last record, but this one was 50-50, and not by being the Everly Brothers’ ‘You get six and I get six’ kind of a deal. We just picked the best songs that we had, and we ended up pretty much right down the middle.”
In a departure from the approach they took with Gattis on Long Time Comin’, the Motorcars brought the entire band into Austin’s Arlyn Studios to record. Micky and Gary were joined by Pablo Trujillo on lead and steel guitar, Bobby Paugh on drums, and Bill Corbin on bass. David Abeyta — close friend to Micky and Gary and former lead guitar player in Reckless Kelly — produced the record. The result is an album that showcases the range and depth of veteran musicians playing off of one another. Paugh and Trujillo set a soulful tone on the opening track, “Laramie,” before the album veers into rock, folk, and traditional country.
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“I think that having the actual band that we tour with will give us a more relatable sound to who we are currently,” Gary says. “I hope people kind of appreciate that.”
That’s an important distinction for the Motorcars. The band started out in Idaho, where the Brauns hail from, as a cowboy band — Micky was only a few years removed from competitive rodeo and Gary was skeptical of whether music was his future. They followed in the footsteps of their older brothers, Cody and Willy Braun of Reckless Kelly, and moved to Austin, where they quickly built enough of a following to make a living and tour the world. They sang rodeo songs and two-steppers, mostly either Micky’s originals or covers of their songwriting mentors Pinto Bennett and Kip Attaway. In the 20 years since, Gary found his voice and writing muses, Micky pushed himself far from his Idaho roots, and the band became as adept as rip-your-heart-out ballads as they were at rodeo tunes.
The second and third tracks on Micky and the Motorcars lay this bare. “Idaho Stars” is a song started by Alabama native Adam Hood and finished by Micky. It’s a twangy two-step about a homesick Idaho cowboy at a rodeo in Georgia. When Micky sings “I’ve had bulls and steers and broncs and beers put me ass-up on the ground/but a stranger’s bed and her Percocet got me right back in the round,” Trujillo’s guitar add a rock edge to the whole production.
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The next track, “High Road,” is propelled by a haunting drumbeat, with Gary singing it as a duet with Kelley Mickwee, whose sharp vocals play out in harmony with Gary’s baritone. “Both you and I know we won’t be better off alone,” they lament, “we only have ourselves to blame/but there wasn’t any high road left to take.”
“I’d wanted to do a duet for, like, two or three records, but really didn’t feel like I had the right gal,” Gary says. “Kelley came in on this, and I feel like she crushed it. She sang it with a lot of emotion, and it really came across and made it work — where it paints a really obvious picture of how it’s supposed to feel.”
To illustrate how deliberate of a songwriter Micky has become, the album’s final track, “The Heart Is Almost Gone,” represents almost a decade of work, start to finish. “The nine-year bastard,” Micky deadpans. He started the song on his own and turned to one of his writing collaborators, Brian Keane, for help, and the two added a second verse.
But it was Willy Braun who ultimately finished the song after Micky told him during a songwriting session that it had been bothering him for nine years.
“He’s probably the easiest guy for me to write with,” Micky says of his brother. “Being brothers, we’ve got that comfort zone. He’s one of those guys who you don’t mind throwing anything out as an idea. A lot of times, it’s hard with artists who you look up to — you get it in your mind that you don’t want to say a line that’s just ridiculous. It’s like getting your pants pulled down. With Willy, I can say whatever I want to say, and he doesn’t mind going, ‘That sucks,’ and it doesn’t hurt my feelings, and we move on.”
The Motorcars will tour in support of the record for the rest of the year, save for a run in the fall in which Micky and Gary will join Jason Eady for a series of acoustic song swaps across the Midwest. The highlight, as usual, will be the annual Braun Brothers Reunion in August, which the Motorcars co-headline with Reckless Kelly in Challis, Idaho. This year, they will be joined on the bill by Corb Lund, American Aquarium, Silverada, and Cody Canada and the Departed, among others. Micky says the stacked lineup is a stroke of good fortune combined with a festival that focuses heavily on a family atmosphere. That’s the appeal to the artists who play it.
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“They know what it’s like,” Micky says of Braun Brothers artists. “They know how fun it is. We’ve reached a status where people get bummed if they don’t get asked to come and play. It’s really fun for us to put our brains together and figure out the right group of people. This year, the stars aligned for pretty much everybody that we invited.”
Josh Crutchmer is a journalist and author whose latest books, Never Say Never and Red Dirt Unplugged are available via Back Lounge Publishing.