Click here for a photo gallery of Big & Rich. After time apart to pursue solo projects, Kenny Alphin and John Rich are reunited with a new album “Hillbilly Jedi” -- the duo’s first full album of all-new music since 2007. (photo: John Partipilo/The Tennessean)
John Rich of Big & Rich swings the ax high in the air, letting it fall on a chunk of wood, splintering it to pieces. His 2½-year-old son, Cash, watches from about 10 feet away.
“He’s learning very quickly,” Rich says proudly of his oldest son. “The ax weighs more than he does.”
Rich’s duo partner, Big Kenny Alphin, gets home, grabs his “babies,” as he calls his sons Lincoln, almost 7, and Dakota, 2, and he says he “slings them around like a tilt-a-whirl 50 times.”
“You throw them up in the air and they just love it,” Alphin says.
Rich showing his toddler how to chop wood on one of his rare days off and Alphin turning himself into a one-man amusement park for his sons is how the men behind country duo Big & Rich find balance in their work and personal lives these days.
It isn’t easy. At the time of this interview, the men were about two weeks away from releasing “Hillbilly Jedi,” the duo’s first full album of all-new music since 2007. (The collection, featuring new single “That’s Why I Pray,” is in stores now.) In addition, Big & Rich was in the midst of a nationwide tour, and Rich was in the thick of filming his new reality talent quest for The CW, “The Next.”
“I’ve told everybody there’s pieces of me laying all over the United States and that if anybody finds a piece of me laying around, please put it in a box and mail it to Nashville,” Rich says. “I plan on gluing myself back together around Thanksgiving.”
Doing big things
The duo learned the hard way that ignoring home life in favor of constant work wouldn’t work. Four years ago there was no balance, and the void created by what was missing tore the multi-platinum-selling duo apart.
“I think there was no doubt we were getting burnt,” Rich says, wearing jeans and his trademark cowboy hat, seated near Alphin in their manager’s office. “We went pedal-to-the-metal 2003-2009 just nonstop, just completely hardcore Big & Rich, playing 180 nights a year, probably more than that. Big chunks of our personal lives were completely not even existing, and I think after awhile you can find yourself resenting your career if you let it manhandle you.”
Following the 2007 release of “Between Raising Hell and Amazing Grace,” Rich and Alphin took that break. Rich wanted to have a family and explore his options in television, and Alphin wanted to expand his family, pursue his charity work and develop a sweeping multimedia project he had shelved.
“I always told myself — and I know Kenny did, too — that if my career ever got to the point that it doesn’t have its hand around my throat and I can control it, I’m going to try and have a real personal life, because you don’t want your family to go on the back burner to your career,” Rich says. “I’ve seen that explode too many times.”
In that down time, both men released solo work, Rich hosted several seasons of “Gone Country” on CMT and won NBC’s Donald Trump reality show, “Celebrity Apprentice,” allowing him to donate more than $1 million to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. Alphin threw himself into his studio work, and he and his family devoted extensive amounts of time to charity.
On the personal front, Rich married his longtime girlfriend, Joan Bush, in 2008 and the couple had two sons, Cash, 2½, and Colt, almost 1. Alphin and his wife, Christiev, adopted second son, Dakota Jefferson, 2.
What they didn’t know was that the break from the recording studio would be about four years long — nearly equal to the amount of time they had spent signed to Warner Music Nashville.
“I think if you had told Kenny and I after the last album that it would be three and a half years or so till you put out another record, we’d a went, ‘Why would it be that long?’ ” Rich says. “But what started happening was what Kenny wanted to take on as Kenny Alphin and what I wanted to take on as John Rich, they were big things. They weren’t things that you do in six months and take a vacation and come back. We’ve been doing our thing, and I think that’s why this piece of music is in such a sweet spot — we’re not burnt out. We’re not tired of each other.”
John Esposito, president and CEO of Warner Music Nashville, couldn’t agree more. He says, “Those two are getting along better now than they ever have in their entire careers,” and that “Hillbilly Jedi” is musically “the most total package of their career together.”
Both of which, he says, are a necessity when it comes to the duo’s future in country music.
“I think they have many, many fans out there at country radio, but at the end of the day, they have been away and not presenting new music for a lot of years,” Esposito says. “Country music is a format that, as much as it embraces artists for the long haul, fans like to constantly be refreshed or they’re going to go find other things to intrigue them. Everyone knows how important this is.”
Keeping the ‘buzz’ going
The rekindling of Big & Rich started more than a year ago, when the duo reunited to record “Fake ID,” which was included in the remake of the movie “Footloose,” starring Julianne Hough. Then mutual friend Gretchen Wilson approached them about a tour last summer. They took her up on it and, toward the end of the run, the men were playing potential songs to record for each other on their buses. It was in one of these listening sessions that Rich played “That’s Why I Pray” for Alphin.
“John said, ‘You got to hear this song.’ I heard ‘That’s Why I Pray,’ and it floored me,” says Alphin. “I said, ‘We have to cut that.’ And he said, ‘I agree.’ We cut it, and that was the beginning of the recording process, and it just kept going.”
That was the end of November. What the duo ended up with is a 12-song collection that includes work they penned as long as 12 years ago as well as material as new as 6 months old, which they wrote with frequent collaborators and Bon Jovi rockers Jon Bon Jovi and Richie Sambora. The album’s title, “Hillbilly Jedi,” came from its first song, the autobiographical “Born Again,” which was written with and features the rockers.
“You know in ‘Star Wars’ when they’re training them and they put the blindfold on and they have to operate without seeing what’s in front of them, I think Big & Rich operates like that,” Rich says of adopting “Hillbilly Jedi” as the title. “I think we record things that no one else has recorded. As nerdy as it might sound to compare that to a Jedi in a ‘Star Wars’ movie, it really is kind of the same thing.”
The album ranges from lighthearted, wacky songs the duo is known for recording, including “Party Like Cowboyz” and “M-e-d-l-e-y of the Hillbilly Jedi” to serious and mature relationship songs — “Last Words” and “Cheat on You” — that the men maintain they never would have been able to write or record before their lengthy hiatus.
“We weren’t both married before where we could even understand a song like ‘Cheat on You,’ ” Alphin says. “Our lives have gone from the prayer and the party and the fun, to also the reality. That song ‘Last Words,’ we couldn’t have written that at any other time in our lives because we are both married and feel how important that is. We believe when people hear music like that that it will change their lives in a good way, too.”
While some of the album’s content has evolved to match a more grown-up Big & Rich, the unmistakable blend of their voices is still the same.
“The thread through this album that is this all-over-the-map stylistically and thematically is one thing: Kenny’s voice and my voice together has a thing to it,” Rich says. “Kenny’s really good on his own. I’m really good on my own. We have our own sounds separately from each other, but you put the two of us together and there’s something that even we don’t know what it is. We call it the buzz spot, and you can literally hear a buzz when our two voices land on the right spot together.”
That vocal buzz is one of the only frequent highs the men enjoy these days. Between families and hectic work schedules, the notorious hard partiers claim they’ve calmed down out of necessity.
“We still drink Crown Royal,” Rich says. “We just have to pick and choose when we drink it.”
“And I cut myself off a little quicker than I did,” Alphin adds. “To have a life as big and rich as you want it to be depends on how you choose to engage.”
Reach Cindy Watts at 615- 664-2227 or ciwatts@tennessean.com.
Click here to see an interactive timeline for Big & Rich's career.
