A country way of life, Episode 30 (Aaron Sterling, Brad & Brett Warren)
Author: Jonny Brick.
Player: Aaron Sterling
Aaron Sterling is another drummer who has divided his career between different styles, where he is as adept at playing on country tracks as he is on pop and rock ones.
On the country side Dierks Bentley, Kane Brown, Lady A, Dustin Lynch, Maren Morris, Jake Owen, Rascal Flatts, Darius Rucker, Carrie Underwood, Keith Urban and Brett Young have all sung over the top of Sterling’s patterns, as have Glen Campbell on his album Ghost on the Canvas and Taylor Swift on her album Red.
Sterling also has credits on albums by Niall Horan, Harry Styles and John Mayer; the punch of Mayer’s song Last Train Home comes from the thwack of the kit. Nicknamed Sterloid, he also paints when he isn’t laying down tracks in the studio, where he names his microphones after fiction writers like Pynchon, Joyce and Borges.
Songwriters: Brad & Brett Warren
In an interview with Bobby Bones, the Warren Brothers talk about their success writing country songs in Nashville. Older brother Brad is the one with long grey hair, and younger brother Brett is the one in glasses. Brad says the brothers’ talent was ‘to help someone get where they wanted to go’.
The pair from Tampa, Florida started out in a Christian rock band before secular music like Van Halen and Lynyrd Skynyrd enthralled them. They wrote together so as not to compete for slots on their own setlist, and after arriving in Nashville released three albums and scored some minor hits. It was their luck to fall in with fellow songwriters Shane McAnally and Tom Douglas, and after both Brad and Brett went sober, the hits started coming, beginning with The Lucky One for Faith Hill and Anyway for Martina McBride.
‘Writing songs is easy,’ Brad has said, ‘but having a good idea is hard. We show up every day.’ Their biggest success as writers came with Tim McGraw, who cut Felt Good on My Lips, Highway Don’t Care and If You’re Reading This, which was recorded not in a studio but live onstage at the ACM Awards.
Their other copyrights include Lights Come On for Jason Aldean and Sober Saturday Night, co-written with Chris Young. Red Solo Cup, which was a very rare outside cut for Toby Keith and features the Warren Brothers on gang vocals; that’s Brad clearing his throat in the song’s intro.
Brad has now bought a house back in Florida, having mourned the death of his son from a drug overdose, while Brett is now a songwriting tutor at Belmont University. The pair are available for corporate events too as part of the Songwriter City brand, where backroom figures like the Warren Brothers tell the stories behind their hits.
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