The Warren Brothers: Staying Diverse and Focusing on the Song
Brett and Brad Warren always write their songs together, and, as the Nashville songwrit-ing duo the Warren Brothers, they have written for Martina McBride, Tim McGraw, Faith Hill, Dierks Bentley and an impressive, steadily growing list of others.
“Because we’re brothers, we have a built-in chemistry,” Brett explains. “We’re also brutally honest with each other. It can be refreshing and also taxing to write with us, but it will not be boring.”
The brothers’ writing process seems about as diverse as their list of co-writers: “We might go have lunch with Martina, and something in conversation will hit us, and we’ll write a song about that. Or Tim will call me up with an idea, and I’ll head over to his house, and we’ll write it. Or we’ll just start messing around on a guitar and try to think of stuff. There’s really no set way.”
The brothers have worked hard to hit their current stride. Early in their now 15-year ca-reer, Brad and Brett recorded as artists, releasing three albums in six years, and served as judg¬es on CMT’s Nashville Star.
“As regular artists, we were way too diverse,” Brett says. “As songwriters, [that diver-sity] has been a blessing. We have a song on Hinder’s record and Toby Keith’s, we have four songs on Tim McGraw’s new album, and we’re writing with Orianthi this week. We just had a song cut by Lynyrd Skynyrd even, so we’re all over the map, and it is so much fun. We’ve written with Chris Daughtry and Ne-Yo and people that are so different, it’s not even funny.”
A-list co-writes aside, the Warren Brothers still measure success in terms of why most songwriters begin in the first place. “The best moments in my career have been the ones where I realized we were writing not for the money, not for an award,” Brett says. “It was all about the song.”
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