Red Dirt Road is a reckoning, a redemption, a record as much about reclaiming where one comes from as it is blazing a trail to where one wants to be. It is acceptance of how you are, what you wish to be, the fearlessness that comes from knowing you won't step down or accept what's handed to you, and the calm that is knowing your place in the world as everyone around you scrambles after things that don't really matter.

For Ronnie Dunn and Kix Brooks, Red Dirt Road is an album that's a lifetime in the making -- culling the influences they've been steeping in from their disparate youths in Arkansas/Texas/Oklahoma and the swampy backwater outside Shreveport, Louisiana. It is a country thing, definitely, but also deep gospel, soul, bluegrass, raw rock and anything else that crossed the ears of two men chewed up with the way music made them feel.

"Both of us were raised on country music," says the always-effusive Brooks, clearly savoring the thing he does, "but there's so much more to it than that. For me, it was really a Delta thing… My dad, as much as he loved Hank Williams, had everything Leadbelly ever did. Ronnie comes from that Tulsa background and there's a lotta Stax and soul to it, so there's definitely a place where we overlap beyond the obvious. There's that down-in gospel thing, too, especially for Ron -- and all that comes from the same place.

"Knowing what I know about Hank Williams' relationship with the blues, letting some soul influences seep in isn't a bad thing. In fact, country and the blues have always been brother and sister, so it actually feels pretty good and pretty right to me."

Indeed, with Red Dirt Road, Kix Brooks and Ronnie Dunn dig a little deeper, push a little further and reach a little higher. Having defined the heart of Saturday night, shot neon into the veins of country music, and taken an industrial-strength approach to the last true vestige of bar-room music - honky tonk - the freewheeling pair decided it was time to open up their whole bag of tricks and harken back to the roots that have made them what they are.

A strong dose of Tulsa's legendary Shelter Records is infused with a deep sense of gospel (Eric Clapton/Bonnie Raitt writer Jerry Lynn Williams' "I Used to Know this Song by Heart"), Stax/Volt and Muscle Shoals are washed in the fetid sounds of the Mississippi delta (the rolling "Believer," the exultant "Feels Good Don't It"), Exile-era Mick and Keith ("You Can't Take the Honky Tonk Out of the Girl"), a deep, gothic bluegrass that works from the darkest places ("Caroline") -- and a revved up, locked-down take on the Bakersfield shuffle that is more than what people expect ("My Baby's Everything I Love") inform Red Dirt Road, the follow-up to B&D's critically-heralded, power-platinum Steers & Stripes. Without breaking a sweat, the Louisiana-born-and-raised guitarslinger/songwriter and the Texas/Arkansas/Okie songwriter/singer with the razor wire wrapped around his emotions have cooked up a whole other kind of country proposition.

"There's a fire and a kick and passion that comes through on the best stuff," concurs Dunn. "When it's happening, that deeper thing gouges or rips its way out. In the midst of this revival disguised as a party -- which is what we try to do on our good nights, you can tell there's more to it. It's an age-old thing, I think: appeal to the emotions, and the heart will follow. It's primitive -- and it's what drives us all."

For Ronnie Dunn, music was built into his DNA. Born of a truck-driving, honky-tonk-singing father with a checkered past, and a devout, church-going mother determined to save him, he was steeped in both of life's extremes from the beginning. Playing sax in the Arkansas school system's music program, he spent hours learning the melodies from Ace Cannon records, remembering, "My father never told me he loved me, but he brought me those records…."

Kix Brooks grew up down the road from Billie Jean Williams Horton -- and the Originals, his 6th grade band, made an early stop at the garage of the widow of both Hank Williams and Johnny Horton. Having been sung to sleep with both of their songs, it gave the guitarslinger a unique perspective on the possibilities. "It made you think it was something people like you could do, though we were just doing it because it was fun, not because it was what you did when you grew up."

No, Brooks went off to military school with his guitar. He fell in love with the American singer/songwriter movement -- starting a band in college that played "the left of center stuff: John Prine, Guy Clark, Frank Zappa, the occasional Paul McCartney song" and opening for people like Delbert McClinton. It wasn't 'til he was burnt out in New Orleans at the grand age of 25 that it occurred to him there was something more to this than entertaining the partying crowd with an eclectic mix of "the funky stuff," and his thoughts turned to songwriting.

For Dunn, cripplingly shy and looking for his place in the world, it was all about being the one of 20 grandchildren to give himself over to preaching. He went first to one Bible college, then Abilene Christian ("they had the better music program"), where weekends found him loading up his little Mercury Capri ("so small, once you loaded the bass amp in, you couldn't put the seat right") and heading out to small rural churches to lead their music ministry.

"I was quiet and not so good in interviews. I didn't give long answers, which had nothing to do with what was in my heart, but what I was able to say," recalls the man with a throat like a stiletto. "But to my family -- both sides, the long line of deacons on my mother's side and the poor destitute sinners who just wanted to wash away the shame of my father [being an ex-con, who did 9 years in Leavenworth] -- once I got 'the call,' I was the one, the hero."

Dunn also got the call to play in the beer joints. The pull of the night being as strong as the pull of the light. It wasn't too long before the dean suggested that Dunn couldn't do both -- and it wasn't much longer after that the young man who could barely make eye contact landed in Tulsa, where he found himself waist deep in the gonzo rock'n'roll fringe that was lost dogs, Englishmen, Bonnies Raitt and Bramlett, Emily Smith, the Isley Brothers, Leon Russell, JJ Cale, the Gap Band, occasionally Eric Clapton and Joe Cocker, Shelter Records, the original country superbusiness aggregation the Halsey Company, and assorted and sundry lost children of the night and the reverb.

"It was where I could mainline the most life," acknowledges Dunn now, "Seeing it all go down to the extreme from the bandstand. From where I came from, it was like being set on fire -- and they all lived for the music. It was an amazing thing. Electric. And I couldn't get enough."

The dark-headed Brooks shared Dunn's affinity for beer joints and the night from an equally young age -- a fact that probably set the stage for them to become the heavyweight honky-tonk champions of the late 20th century. "Even before I could drink, I always lived in a real partying environment, hanging with these folks going' through wives, comin' home and finding everything gone," Brooks confesses with a laugh. "They were oil pipe fitters and truck drivers… and even though it was traumatic stuff, it was real exciting stuff because people who tend to hang out in bars and drink a lot tend to have a lot of drama in their lives."

Though witnesses to the drama, it was the music that trapped both young men. For Brooks, who drifted north to Maine to be a solo act ("though I never learned any Buffett and I never played a Holiday Inn gig") and finally on to Nashville to stake his claim as a songwriter, ultimately penning the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band's bittersweet #1 "Modern Day Romance," it was about the stories and the ability to illuminate larger truths in what the tales revealed.

Dunn, on the other hand, was finding the catharsis of religion on the bandstand. "The ultimate religious message is that you are simply free to be human without restriction, but are completely loved and accepted in the end. There's no intellectual way to accept it… it just is. But you're not gonna understand there's something out there beyond your power of reason -- like music, the way that it feels.

"For me, it was 24/7 consumption -- to the point where it stood to be almost a damaging addiction. Here I was this quiet church kid, hanging out with these wild ass rock & roll people, hitting the Caravan where (Bob's brother) Johnny Wills was playing. And back then, Tulsa was a wild swing town -- so I'd get called up.

"When 'Urban Cowboy' hit, I'd gone to see Gatemouth Brown at Cain's Ballroom. His steel player knew some people with money who were going to open a giant honky-tonk. We signed on as the house band… and never looked back."

Well, Dunn did write "Boot Scootin' Boogie" (originally recorded by 10x Grammy winners Asleep at the Wheel) and "Hard Workin' Man" during that tenure, and went on to win the Marlboro Talent Search. He also had a couple of fizzled out indie record deals, and a near deal with Shelter Records' Denny Cordell, who was finishing the first Tom Petty album and confessed, "I don't know that much about country music," but offered encouragement and insight into the Willis Alan Ramsey record they'd just released and a chance meeting with Van Morrison.

While Brooks was carving out a name as a writer and also pursuing solo deals that were going nowhere, each had caught the attention of Arista Nashville founder Tim DuBois. The songwriter/producer had a feeling the pair would have chemistry -- and introduced them. For all their differences, there was enough common ground in the lost nights, human witness, love of good stories and basic language, that there was a writing affinity. And the tension between Brooks' freewheeling performance style and Dunn's intense vocal performance created a tautness that would fire jukeboxes for the next 10 years, four Entertainer of the Year Awards and more.

But for all the hits, Steers' three consecutive #1s: the 6-week, chart-topping Billboard 2001 Country Single of the Year "Ain't Nothing 'Bout You," the surging "Only in America," and the aching ballad "The Long Goodbye" marked the first time since the sextuple platinum Brand New Man debut they'd achieved that distinction, (not to mention "Neon Moon," a killer remake of "My Maria," "She's Not the Cheatin' Kind," "Rock My World [Little Country Girl]," and "She Used to Be Mine") -- Brooks & Dunn's appeal has always been about lifting people out of where they are and putting them in a place where they can be what they imagine.

Red Dirt Road, for all its seeking, its recognition, its reflection on both where Ronnie Dunn and Kix Brooks come from, is an album that will sweep the listener up and along. If insight is granted into unexamined lives lived fully if without thinking, than that is the unintended byproduct of two men pushing their own envelope but also looking to anchor their music to the things that ultimately defined them.

"I knew we were going to call this album Red Dirt Road before the first song was even picked," says Dunn flatly. "I wanted that thread, that growing up in rural America and all the universal touchstones we all go through -- that first beer, wrecking my first car two weeks after I got it, being taken to a revival by my cousins who lived a few miles farther down that road. That road ran through every major event in my young life… and who would think a kid growing up like that, going to Bible college, would end up here? But that's the power of life and roots and dreams -- it can."

"And even though it may be a place people haven't been," picks up Brooks, who co-wrote the mandolin-drenched anthem to coming of age and life and knowledge, "it takes them places they have been. The feelings and sensations are similar. I mean, for me it was a Camaro, not a GTO, even though I wanted one! I always say: if you paint a good enough picture, people will find a way to put themselves in it."

Certainly that's true with the muscle-flexing moments here. There's the warm night tale of youth and freedom at the tips of a good friend gone too soon's fingers, "When We Were Kings," which Brooks quantifies with a "Most of us wouldn't want to be that guy 'cause he was so outlandish, but he sure was fun to hang with… and you come to realize: the truth about your heroes is they sometimes go down, even when they're young." There's the romping re-working of Jimmie Vaughan and Nile Rodgers' "Good Cowboy," which Brooks explains appeals because "Cowboys represent freedom in a big way…." And the hushed, slow burn of the utterly Leon Russell-esque "I Used to Know this Song by Heart," which features Dunn's most wide-open vocal to date.

"When I'm doing a vocal on a song like 'Boot Scoot' or 'Neon Moon,' back then the barriers of where you could go were pretty defined. If you sang them the way I do now, they never would have been played," Dunn allows. "This time, I jumped in, threw caution to the wind and put my foot down. I did things in the past I never would have done, like all that stuff at the end of 'Used to Know…' and rather than worrying, I figured, put it out there -- "It's all valid, but I think our fans know us well enough now to let us go. It may be a little strange, being quite that free… like in a Southern Baptist church, you don't stand up and throw your hands in the air or start dancing in the aisles. That's more like a holy roller Pentecostal showing up, but that freer expression, that being consumed by it is ultimately where you want to get to."

The musicians -- including Steve Winwood vet Michael Rhodes, upstart power hitter Shannon Forrest, Southern California country rock vet steelman Dan Dugmore, Tulsa alum saxman Jim Horn, Mellencamp firethrower vocalist Crystal Taliefero and second generation belter Bekka Bramlett -- were also challenged to free their minds, so their muse could follow. To that end, there were some fairly incendiary performances.

"Kenny Greenberg got downright Pentecostal on 'Used to Know'," Dunn recalls. "Everybody in the rooms jaws just dropped listening to him play that guitar. And then everybody came up to that level, because those players all have it - they're just not encouraged or allowed to go there. It's a very rootsy thing, drawing on blues and country and the church, and it was all over Tulsa, which is something we wanted to get back to."

Getting back to it was hardly a problem. Though success can sometimes create a blueprint, it can also allow license. Whether it's the organic song of real-life commitment that makes "She Was Born to Run" the most direct declaration of being there the freewheeling honky tonkers have ever delivered, or the yearning piner for the ghost of a love lost "Memory Town," Red Dirt Road is resplendent with the beat of emotion, the power of moments, and the will to dig deeper.

"I think it's probably more reflection and romance than sex nonsense," concedes Brooks, whose first musical epiphany came hearing Otis Redding's Live from Europe. "You turn to a certain amount of reflection and want to go a little deeper in the well… At the end of the night, you have to open up a little bit some, too. I feel like it's a pretty honest representation of how I look at the world, because as songwriters, a lot of the time you focus on how you wish you were or wouldn't like to be. Red Dirt Road is pretty reflective of where I think I am.

"At the end of the day, redemption can come from a lot of places. I think people miss that sometimes. It needs to come spiritually, but from your friends, too, and your family, the people you perform for, even the people who criticize you. Sometimes people tell you only need redemption from God; but this life on earth makes it also important to get it from the people living here on Earth. It kind of extends the deal."

Dunn concurs, "We're projected as just a couple of good time, party guys who are happy to be here and have a job in country music, but that's overly simple. Nobody can really be reduced to two dimensions like that -- so we're finally getting to the place where we can quit skipping over the surface and do something that has a little bit of essence.

"There's more depth to the lyrics, the performance, even the music. It was time."

And so with "Red Dirt Road" and its promise of great things down the road and the reality of the settled base back home, Brooks & Dunn shift ever so subtly to a richer, deeper, truer picture of the places they've been. Still two to shoot out the lights, they're also about settling in and settling down when the time is right, knowing that life is what you make it, happiness is where you are and the rest will come if you let it.

Brooks & Dunn photo courtesy of Arista Nashville.