The Warren Brothers Bring It All Back Home (Tampa Market Focus)

Play late. Sleep late. Repeat. Brad and Brett Warren were making a living as full-time musicians in The Big Guava but gave it up in 1995 to move to Nashville where they scored a record deal and eventually became sought-after hit songwriters, co-penning Gold and Platinum-certified singles for Keith Urban, Dierks Bentley, Jason Aldean, Blake Shelton, Toby Keith, Faith Hill and Tim McGraw, who has recorded more than 30 of the duo’s songs.

Outside of the country format, they have written for Lynyrd Skynyrd, Nickelback, Hinder, Joss Stone and Boys Like Girls.

Brett Warren recently talked to Pollstar about growing up, getting out and going back to Tampa.

Pollstar: What was it like growing up in a tropical town?
Brett Warren: It’s interesting, because when you grow up somewhere, you don’t appreciate it until you leave. So, growing up in Tampa, I did not like it that it was hot. I did not like that it was flat. I didn’t care about the beach and the ocean. Thirty years of being in Nashville, I own a little house on Madeira Beach back there, and I’m there as much as I can be. And if the music business wasn’t here, I’d be back there. I love it…As I got older, I realized how beautiful it is. How being by the ocean is such a gift.

What are your early memories of hearing live music?
We were from a super, super Christian family so we snuck out to see Van Zandt and .38 Special – funny, we ended up writing our very first cut with Johnny Van Zant and Donnie Van Zant for Lynyrd Skynyrd. We were like 15. It was at the University of South Florida Sun Dome [now the Yuengling Center]. We had to act like we were spending the night at someone else’s house.

You were 11 and Brad was 9, when you picked up your first guitar. When did you start your first band together?
Probably I was 13 before we started the band. But Brett and I have been in some kind of band – I’m 56 now – and we have never not been a band, so sort of a performing act together since then.

Because we had strict Christian parents, we weren’t allowed to play in bars and nightclubs. So, we would also have to sneak and do that. Brett was only 17 and we would have to sneak him in the back door. There were bars like the Rocket Club, which was like a big hard-rock, original-songs bar and they would have big acts come in and we would open for Dokken or play the back patio. On Friday night they would let you play all original music.

We played our original set for a bunch of older bar people who were not at all interested, but somehow, we ended up with a little following.

So, when did your musical fortunes change?
I can’t remember exactly what year, but it would have been the early ‘90s. The rock radio station had a local hour on Sunday nights. And we had all of our friends call and pester them to play one of our songs so much they finally had to do it. They had a request line and it ended up being the No. 1 requested song. It was a song called “Blue Eyes” – it wasn’t great either – but 98-Rock played it and because of that we got gigs around town.

Was this a hit with your hard-rock, hair band St. Warren?
Yes, Brett and I were always a band and we had a bass player, a guy named Jeff McDonald, he was pretty much our bass player throughout. We had more drummers than Spinal Tap, a different drummer every two weeks.

Where would you play?
When we were coming up playing clubs we would literally play five or six nights in a row at Ybor City all at different clubs. You would take your gear from one club to the next, to the next. There were so many live venues. The Thirsty Troll, the Columbia Restaurant had bands, there was a place called Cherry’s that was run by a wrestler named Joe Gomez and Ric Flair and all these wrestlers would come in.

How would you promote your shows?
It was old school back then. You would flyer all the bars. Put them on every windshield at every bar in town and try to get them to your show. It was very different from the social media age we live in now.

What was the music culture of Tampa like coming up?
There arose in the early ‘90s a real original rock scene in Tampa. They had country bars, but they always played, like, line dance cover tunes. But there was a big original rock scene where people searched out original music and loved it. It didn’t amount to much but it did catapult us into songwriting and writing our own music instead of playing covers.

So how did you end up making the move to Nashville in 1995?
Brett was driving home from a gig, and I was in the passenger seat, and the song “I Can’t Make You Love Me” by Bonnie Raitt came on the radio and he just stopped the car, pulled over to the side of the road and listened to the whole song. And I had already been thinking, like in my head, “We gotta to get out of here. We’ve got to do something, and we need to go to Nashville.” The beach life is so relaxing you kind of get entrenched in it. And he heard that song, he looked at me and said, “I want to move to Nashville and write songs like that.” That song moved us to Nashville.

Even after record snowfall that first winter, you didn’t look back. But if you were to put on a show in Tampa today, where would you perform?
I have a home at Madeira beach, and I’m there part time, and I love it so much. There’s a little bandshell, and I keep threatening for us to have a Harley ride down there, some sort of benefit, to benefit a charity that we’re active in, and play Rock Park in Madeira Beach. That’s where I would play if we’re going to do a real show.