"We looked at him and said, 'You want to do what?'" And he said, 'I want Big & Rich to be the first act I sign to Warner Bros."
"I got more money than George Strait
I throw Benjies out the window all day
Just to see how far they fly, bye bye
I get more girls than the president
Mom and dad still pays the rent
And I throw parties all night long
But in my real world things don't always turn out so good
Like you wish they would."
--"Real World"
Horse Of A Different Color, the first fruit of Worley's signing, starts with a sermon: "Brothers and sisters," declaims Big Kenny, "we are here for one reason and one reason alone: to share our love of music." It ends, an hour later, with a hymn of sorts: "Live This Life," which features a wailing background vocal by Martina McBride. In between are party songs and sober songs, drinking songs and thinking songs, songs about the legends of the West and songs about the casualties of our streets. Often as not, the songs fall into a few of those categories at the same time.
Musically, John and Big Kenny cover a similarly wide territory. They play country music, but country music that has room for echoes of everything from the Everly Brothers to Limp Bizkit to Queen, from honky tonk to rock 'n' rap. "Charlie Pride was the man in black," they sing in their anthem, "Rollin' (The Ballad of Big and Rich)." "Rock 'n' roll used to be about Johnny Cash." Then they turn the microphone over to Cowboy Troy, who raps the song home.
"We never went, 'Nah, this isn't a country song,' or 'This doesn't sound like something anybody would cover,'" says Kenny. "We were writing stuff that was out there. We've written bone country and psychedelic rock and everything in between. We just love music, and we like taking all aspects of it and seeing what comes out."
"What we're doing now is American music," he adds. "And the most American music format that I know of is country. That audience understands us. People that listen to country music don't just listen to country music. The kids who are coming up listen to Johnny Cash, then Kenny Chesney, then Ludacris or Outkast or Kid Rock. I mean, John's little brother wears a John Deere hat and an Eminem t-shirt."
"And Nashville's going to catch up to that," says John. "They want to."
Already, the portents are there: Music City is now a place where Nine Inch Nails' Trent Reznor can write the country single of the year, and Norah Jones can perform on the CMA Awards. This, it seems, is the boundary-obliterating terrain in which Big & Rich thrive.
"Life's as large as you want to make it," says John. To him and to his partner, life is indeed large, and big, and rich-musically, emotionally, philosophically, and every other way you might want to measure it.
