Kix Brooks is opening up about his latest venture. During the latest episode of American Songwriter’s Off the Record podcast, the Brooks & Dunn musician sat down with Lisa Konicki to discuss Hope On The Inside, a nonprofit he started with his pal, Briana Calhoun.
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The journey to Hope On The Inside, a nonprofit dedicated to empowering incarcerated individuals, wasn’t a quick one, but it was a deeply personal one for Calhoun.
Calhoun grew up with her biological father in prison, while her stepfather “should have been the one in prison.” As such, her mom was “afraid for good reason,” and she and her siblings were “stuck.”
“We were in a bad situation and experienced a lot of trauma,” Calhoun said. “It was eggshells every second I was awake.”
When Calhoun was 16, she got “hooked on meth” by the town sheriff’s 26-year-old daughter.
“I hadn’t even smoked pot yet at the time,” she recalled. “And I knew it was bad, but at the time I didn’t care because I’d just been so depressed and anxious for so long that I just wanted to feel good, and it made me feel good. And I felt as good as I could. I felt as good as I could for the next eight years.”
During that time, Calhoun got two double degrees, because, while “amphetamines are a terrible thing, they can also help you memorize a book in a very short period of time.”
“I was saving face for a long time, but it got to the point where I couldn’t save face anymore,” she said. “I couldn’t hide it anymore.”
Briana Calhoun Opens Up About Her Lowest Point
At that point, Calhoun couldn’t hold down a job, had begun using intravenously, was in and out of institutions, and wound up homeless for more than a year.
“I got caught in the system where it was just jail, rehab, halfway house, jail, rehab, halfway house,” she said, before admitting that she “could feel death knocking on my door” after three overdoses.
“Every time I used from that point, I’m like, ‘This could be the end,’” she recalled. “I didn’t care whether I lived or died, but a small part of me was still in there somewhere. I was scared of dying, but I couldn’t stop.”
Eventually, Calhoun was arrested and sentenced to five years in prison. She wound up serving 18 months behind bars, during which time “a lot of good things” happened for Calhoun.
“For the first time in my life, I was safe, truly. For the first time in my life, I didn’t feel like I was walking on eggshells. I didn’t feel like I was constantly having to escape from my reality,” she said. “… When you’re using, you’re just running, you’re just running from your past, your pain, your guilt, your shame, all of that, and you’re not facing it. And when you’re locked in a cell, that’s all there is to do, you have to face it.”
Calhoun began to rebuild her spirit and wound up coming back “much stronger.”
“When I finally did get released, I came out with just this dogged determination I’d never had before,” she said. “… I decided I wasn’t going to look like an addict, talk like one, walk like one. Everything about me was going to change.”
With that mindset, Calhoun got a job at a small paper, before eventually getting her master’s degree in education.
How Kix Brooks and Briana Calhoun Connected
A few years later, Calhoun decided to give music a try. While working on a documentary about her life, she got connected to Brooks via email through a distant cousin.
“It attached a lot of pieces of her history and edited together some footage from her childhood through her drug years. It basically did a rough job of telling her story,” Brooks recalled. “I was just impressed by what she’d done.”
Brooks decided to call Calhoun up and offer to cook her a steak next time she was in town. She accepted the invitation, and the rest is history.
Eventually, Calhoun wound up sending Brooks some of the music she’d been working on, including one standout line: “A six-pack just talked me into a whiskey.” Five years later, that lyric turned into a song titled “One More Shot.”
In addition to their musical partnership, Calhoun and Brooks developed a business one when the country star convinced his pal to start their organization, Hope On The Inside.
What to Know About Kix Brooks and Briana Calhoun’s Organization
The idea came to Brooks when he accompanied Calhoun on one of her visits to prison. While there, the high school teacher played music for inmates and chatted with them about her own experiences.
“You can tell that prisoners really enjoy being entertained and having someone take their mind off the self for a while and whatever, give them a little escape there,” Brooks said. “But she also stands up, and she explains to them what she’s been through… [and] how she got out of it and how she found her self-worth.”
Calhoun’s testimony left many inmates with “tears in their eyes,” Brooks said, as they came to the realization that “maybe I can do this.”
Eventually, he convinced her to start the nonprofit.
“I truly feel as though Hope On The Inside has become a movement,” Calhoun said. “… The more we grow, the more work we have to do, the more we expand.”
That expansion has included booking prison performances from stars such as Chase Rice, Dallas Davidson, and Randy Houser.
Working on the nonprofit has been a moving experience for Brooks.
“I had a guy come up, and he was just extremely heartfelt, very articulate,” Brooks said of a recent prison visit. “We just had a nice back and forth. I was really impressed by the way he spoke, just in the way that he put his thoughts together. It was really a meaningful conversation.”
Calhoun added of the conversation, “Essentially, he had been considering taking his life, and he shared with Kix that he had changed his mind after hearing us.”
Currently, Calhoun is working on a video curriculum that’s meant to help people out of tough situations. Hope On the Inside is also planning a fundraiser to distribute reentry packages from soon-to-be-released inmates.
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