As half of the duo Brooks & Dunn, Kix Brooks has earned one of the most successful careers in country music history—and it all started with his unwavering work ethic when he first decided to master songwriting: “I was dedicated, and focused, and every day doing it,” he says.
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“I feel like basically, the things that we write are an evolution of our influences and the things that we really love,” he says, citing Hank Williams and Johnny Horton as inspirations when he was growing up in Louisiana. “They all lived literally a couple of blocks from where my home was in Shreveport. Those are songs I got sung to sleep with, so that’s down in there somewhere.”
His other main musical influences came from within his personal life. “I grew up in a family that sang as much as they talked,” he says. “Every time we got in the car, especially when I was with my cousins, we were singing all the time.” (He recalls that singing Johnny Cash’s “A Boy Named Sue” was a particular favorite of his at this time.) “And of course,” he adds, “I grew up singing in church, like a lot of people in the South.”
Brooks started creating his own songs when he was in high school, but dismisses those efforts as being “kind of goofy stuff,” such as parody songs. Then there was “Tucker’s Got the Mange,” the first full-fledged song he can remember writing.
“I had a girl that I was kind of sweet on at the time that had a dog that had the mange,” he says. “She had heard that if you put motor oil on it, it could cure the mange. And it freaked the dog out, and it ran out in front of a car, and the car ran over it and killed it. It was real tragic. So just to make her feel better, I wrote this song called “Tucker’s Got the Mange.” Though he says that song was “horrible,” he also found that it went over well when he played it at bars.
He continued refining his writing and performing skills while attending college at Louisiana Tech University. This, he says, was another time when he absorbed significant songwriting lessons. “We were really chasing what was coming out of Austin at the time in the ’70s—Willie [Nelson] and Jerry Jeff [Walker] and Waylon [Jennings] and all that kind of stuff. Guy Clark for sure, and Townes Van Zandt. Those progressive Texas songwriters were a big influence on me.”
At the same time, rock music was making an impression on him, and a hint of this started showing up as a distinctive touch in his own songs: “I always loved the Rolling Stones and Allman Brothers. I like rock music with great lyrics.”
After graduating, Brooks moved to Maine to be near his sister, who owned an advertising agency where he could work while continuing to perform at night. “I enjoyed it,” he says, but admits that “It was just eating at me that if I didn’t really commit to music, I would never know if I could cut it. I was building a decent reputation as a solo coffee house kind of player, telling stories and writing songs. I just figured it was time to go and see if I could do it.”
For many aspiring country artists, this would mean moving to Nashville—but Brooks had a different idea: “Being from Louisiana, I was really enamored with New Orleans. Tom Waits was one of my favorite songwriters, and he was in New Orleans with Rickie Lee Jones back then. Both of them, I really dug their music, and especially their songwriting. So I said, ‘Man, I want to go get in the middle of all that.’”
Surviving in the New Orleans music scene proved much harder than Brooks expected, though. He hit a particularly low point after he played 72 nights in a row, mostly on rowdy Bourbon Street, “and I got really burned out and got thrown out of my apartment,” he says.
He called his friend Jody Williams, a Nashville native who had grown up amid the Music City’s inner circles. Williams encouraged Brooks to make the move to Tennessee and helped him get a job sweeping the floor at Charlie Daniels’s publishing company.
Two years after he arrived in Nashville, Brooks got his big break when the Oak Ridge Boys recorded one of his songs, “You Made a Rock of a Rolling Stone.” And with that, he says, “I was a professional songwriter.”
He released his self-titled debut album in 1989, but before he could release a follow-up, a new president took over at his record company, who made it clear that he was unenthusiastic about what Brooks had to offer. Brooks parted ways with the label.
Soon after, his friend Tim DuBois (a successful record producer and songwriter) made a life-changing suggestion. “He introduced me to Ronnie Dunn and said, ‘I kind of have this idea: I’m trying to get a duo together, and I like the way both of you guys write. Just see if you can write a song together; that’s what I’d really like to hear.’”
Because they respected DuBois, Brooks and Dunn followed his advice—and two days later, at their first songwriting session, they wrote “Brand New Man.” The next day, they got together again and wrote “My Next Broken Heart.” “And those were our two first number one records,” Brooks says.
And the hits kept coming: “Ronnie already had ‘Neon Moon’ and ‘Boot Scootin’ Boogie’—those were our third and fourth number one records.” A song Brooks brought to the table, “Lost and Found,” continued this streak.
From there, Brooks & Dunn went on to release more than 50 songs that have charted (including 20 that reached No. 1), resulting in more than a dozen albums that have achieved platinum or multiplatinum sales status. As they note on their website, they have “a discography counting more album sales than any duo in history—regardless of genre.” In 2019, they were inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame.
“We just kept putting one foot in front of the other, figuring, ‘This album will be our last. There’s no way this continues to keep going.’ But it did,” Brooks says.
Despite their achievements, the duo parted amicably in 2010. “We have spent a lot of years, like most artists do if you have some success, [where] the label wants more and more all the time, as quick as you can write great songs and turn them around,” Brooks says, “but it’s not that easy.”
They each resumed solo careers, with Brooks releasing the album New to This Town in 2012; it reached No. 10 on the country music charts.
In 2019, Brooks & Dunn returned with the album Reboot, followed by Reboot II in 2024; both feature the duo reworking their previous singles with noteworthy artists, including Luke Combs, Brett Young, Jon Pardi, Kacey Musgraves, Ashley McBryde, Thomas Rhett, Kane Brown, Lainey Wilson, Morgan Wallen, Marcus King, Jelly Roll, and many more.
This ties in well with Brooks’s strong belief in collaborating with others, including with his songwriting method. “My process these days is getting together with some writers that I know and respect, and that I have generally a rapport with,” he says. “Sometimes I’ll write with somebody that I’ve never written with before, and a lot of times that’s fruitful, but it’s really comfortable to write with guys that you’ve already shared a lot of yourself [with] and know where you’re coming from.
“That’s how co-writing goes in Nashville: you just call people up and say, ‘Hey, why don’t you come over to the house at 10 o’clock tomorrow if you’re free?’ And then sit around, drink some coffee, and go, ‘You got any good ideas?’ ‘Well, I was thinking about this.’ And that’s usually how the day starts. Sometimes you get to talking about what happened last night, if it was something crazy or whatever, and somebody will say something and you go, ‘Let’s write that.’ And you’re off and running. I feel like co-writing is a great way to avoid ruts and to come up with fresh things.”
And, he says, he’s also writing again with Ronnie Dunn, with the idea that it could lead to a new studio album. “We’re writing a lot of songs in that direction,” he says. “We’ve written some cool things, and we’re having fun getting back into the process.”
Beyond music, Brooks has been doing significant charitable work. He’s the vice president and a board member for Hope on the Inside, a rehabilitation/outreach charity that uses music and art programs in prisons to improve incarcerated individuals’ mental outlook and to help them have better outcomes when they re-enter society.
For the past 25 years, he’s been on the advisory board of Vanderbilt Children’s Hospital in Nashville (and he has served as the board chair since 2020). For this, he has frequently put his music business connections to good use to help boost fundraising efforts.
“At this point in my life, I like being engaged in places where I feel like I can help people change their lives, and maybe help them make a difference in what they’re doing with their lives and their families,” he says.
Brooks also continues to support other musicians by having them perform at Arrington Vineyards, an award-winning winery just south of Nashville that he co-owns. “We have a hundred-acre property, so on half of the property, it’s set up with little tasting bars, and we have jazz on the stage on the weekends,” he says. “You can walk through a little stand of woods, and it opens up into a big Tennessee barn, and we have bluegrass there every weekend. It’s just a really fun entertainment venue, and a great place for great players to do their thing.”
Despite his enthusiasm for these other activities, though, it’s clear that his main focus remains on continuing to write and perform music. He says he’s pleased when he looks back on the legacy that he’s created so far with Brooks & Dunn and with his own solo work.
“I’m proud of a lot of the music we’ve made,” he says. “Almost every day, there’s somebody coming up and telling you some story that some music that you made, some song that you sang, really touched their life in a really special way. It is humbling. It’s hard sometimes to not be embarrassed by the fact that it could mean that much—but it does make you take your work seriously, for sure.”
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