Myke JohnsIt started with a startling chord. I was sitting in Brother Hawk’s little wooden box of a rehearsal space, situated mere yards away from the singer’s family home. I listened as the band ran through their set in preparation for a rare Atlanta show. Two or three songs in, I let my mind wander a little and was brought back by the sound of all four members hitting one loud, sharp chord. I actually jumped a little, shaken. It wasn’t just the volume, but the precision. This quartet of dudes—JB, James, Nick, Evan—made one swift motion in unison, like the musical equivalent of breaking a cinder block with your hand. And they did it without saying a word to each other.
I was sitting in the practice space because I’m Nick’s brother, but I’m sharing this because the band is undeniable. And there’s a story behind their jet-fueled blues that you should read.
As I’m writing this, the band is releasing their Big Trouble Sessions EP one song at a time, week-by-week. It starts with that same startling chord. From the first blast of their newest song “Like Water,” it is genuinely impressive
The line “All this time I spent learning how to suffer / Don’t you take this from me now” jumps out, and between that and the moody, downbeat music, you’d be forgiven for mistaking this for a lovelorn breakup song. But like water, there’s more going on under the surface.
As the chorus ascends, JB sings “you just poured out and rained down all that I could take / I’ll hold on to every single drop of love you gave,” and we see the bigger picture here.
The song’s about Joe.
Credit: Amy Kenyon Photography
Brother Hawk is basically a family. Guitarist and singer JB Brisendine is at the head. He and keyboardist and singer Nick Johns-Cooper met when the two were in elementary school. They bonded over music and played as a duo with Nick on drums for a short while. Bassist James Fedigan played with Brisendine in the hardcore band Crossbearer when they were just out of high school. After that group split up in the mid-‘00s, JB cast around for another project, something closer to his family’s obsession with Neil Young, though his aim was to go in without any concept, no preconceived genre. Just music.
Brother Hawk formed in 2010 and released their first EP, Love Songs, that summer. As they developed and cycled through drummers, one more member became a constant: Joe Brisendine, JB’s dad.
“He started welding when he was 15 years old professionally,” JB tells me. “But my dad did and could do anything. He built the house that I grew up in, he built this room that we practice in—that we recorded in. He was a welder, a carpenter, and artist.”
The artist part never sat well with the Brisendines, a well-established, conservative family that included both county commissioners and ruffians in equal measure. Joe, however, was half Native American and adopted. Early in his life, he started playing piano and showed an aptitude for music. But that was cut short when one matriarch of the family told him that no one wanted to see his fat fingers on the keyboard. But where his own artistic impulses were actively discouraged, Joe Brisendine raised his sons in a household full of music.
“[His art] was never nurtured,” JB says, “but he couldn’t help but for it to come out. So when I started playing guitar, it wasn’t even a thought, dad just started playing with me. I’d learn songs and he’d play the harmonica. When we started doing this band, I was just like ‘oh dad’s gotta play harmonica on this shit.’ It wasn’t even a thought. It was just like ‘oh my dad is in this band.’ It wasn’t a discussion, ever. It was just clear and obvious and natural.
“He’s just always had a deep connection and love of music,” Brisendine continues. “And [he] didn’t have anybody to do a fraction of what he and my mom did for me.”
When JB discovered a natural talent for music at a young age, his parents got him a guitar and encouraged him to grow as an artist. I remember hanging out with the family then—JB playing blues licks I’d never be able to pull off, and his parents sharing his very loud enthusiasm for music as the family TV showed everything from live Stevie Ray Vaughn performances to Ministry and Skinny Puppy videos. I swear to god, Mamma Brisendine is the picture of a loving, happy Southern woman with a slow drawl and a quick wit, doting on her sons and the revolving door of punk kids coming through the house. And the woman fucking loves Skinny Puppy. I have never met anyone else like the Brisendine family or like Joe and I likely never will.
“My whole life he’s been my friend more than he’s been my dad,” JB says. “He’s just fucking cool. The epitome of cool always.”
Through years of playing around the region and releasing music independently, Brother Hawk formed a relationship with long-running Atlanta band Blackberry Smoke, and opened a number of shows for them. And so the younger Brisendine got to put his father on stage in front of massive crowds at Atlanta’s Tabernacle and Nashville’s legendary Ryman Auditorium, among many others.
“Dad played in front of thousands of people on multiple occasions and was adored by people for being a musician,” JB says. “And it didn’t dawn on me until later that I could give that to him. Because he gave it to me. I’m immensely proud of that.”
The haircut needs to be addressed. When I first met Joe, going over to his house when I was a teenager to hang out with his kids, he had a ponytail that hung all the way down his back. He had a big, loud voice and a strong handshake, and he was funny without trying to be.
“He was a free person for his whole life,” JB laughs, “even when it wasn’t easy for him to be. So when it got easy for him to be a free person, he got real fuckin’ free. Anybody that knows my dad knows that he had a fuckin’ crazy-ass haircut. The reverse mohawk whatever.”
After years of having a long ponytail, he buzzed his hair down to a high and tight “cop haircut,” as JB describes it. Then he made a trip to the barber.
“He told the chick, ‘shave the middle out, put a horseshoe on top of my head,'” JB recalls. “She was like ‘what?’ ‘Put a horseshoe on top of my head!’ And she was like, ‘Alright.’ And he came home and it was like, open in the back and he just had a horseshoe. And I was like, ‘That looks fuckin’ cool!’ and he was like ‘I’m gonna grow it out. I’m gonna let it get tall, and finally when it gets long enough to fall over it’s gonna look like a big rack o’ lamb on top of my head!”
“So that’s just a haircut that he had… ten years?” JB says. “He had it up until I shaved his head because he had brain surgery. That was the only end of that haircut, was drilling a hole in his skull.”
Brother Hawk had planned to begin recording their second full-length, The Clear Lake, in early 2017, but that was pushed back when Joe got sick. In February of that year, he was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. JB dropped everything so he could drive his father to Emory Hospital for treatment. Five days a week for six weeks, buying time. The band loaded into Maze Studios in Cabbagetown to finally begin tracking that May.
The album ebbs and flows between sorrow and joy—often in the space of a single song. And while Brisendine sings about loss and loneliness, he manages never to verge into angst. The seeming opposite moods are held in equal measure as if to acknowledge that there can’t be one without the other. And that’s alright.
The title track opens with a spindly, angular groove and a verse full of sickness and haunting. Then the chorus opens up with a Hammond organ sweeping up into its upper registers, and the narrator admitting that his subject is “just like smoke from the chimney” and “you’re just like the wind through the trees / just like ‘On the Beach’ / just like all those things that comfort me when I’m in need.” The nod to Neil Young here is particularly relevant. Music writer William Ruhlmann notes that Young’s 1974 album was “saying goodbye to despair, not being overwhelmed by it.” The same could be said of The Clear Lake, which opens with the kiss-off of “Quittin’ Time” (“If the price of my happiness is a little loneliness / I’m down to pay it all night long“) and ends with the incandescent “Force of Will,” which finds its narrator pledging “I know it’s nothing or everything / Let me give myself to the things I need.” For an album full of furious guitar soloing and drums that threaten to punch through your speakers, it is an overwhelmingly positive statement.
“I pride myself on being the really positive person,” JB tells me. “[Someone] that keeps everything in check and provides perspective for everybody.”
“The Clear Lake” falls in the middle of the album’s tentpole trio of songs, the next being the towering “The Black Dog.” Written after Brother Hawk’s first European tour, the lyrics have the millions-of-miles-from-home feel of a band on the road. It’s also Joe’s single performance on the album.
After initial tracking wrapped at Maze, the band recorded guitar overdubs at Chase Park Transduction in Athens before cutting vocals in the practice space Joe had built at the family home. On July 12, 2017, Joe, JB, and recording engineer TJ Elias gathered in the makeshift studio to get Joe’s harmonica solo on “The Black Dog” down on tape.
The solo comes in around the four-minute mark. JB sings the line, “No one loves their home like someone who’s had to be gone,” and the harmonica keens like the sound of a faraway freight train. It is a haunting and beautiful use of the instrument. It trades licks with the guitar much in the same way I imagine father and son had done in their living room decades earlier.
After running through four or five takes, JB let his dad hear a rough mix of “Good as Gold,” another song on the record, and one of Joe’s favorites. Then, Joe stepped outside and collapsed. He died lying in his garden.
CREDIT: WOMBATFIRE
Two months later, after the funeral, JB and Elias walked back into the practice space to record one last song. “White Oak” leads into “The Clear Lake.” It stands out as the one stripped-down acoustic number on the album. JB recorded it in a single take.
The wind sang and the oaks swayed all for me
And I thought of all that they’d seen
And all they’ve yet to see when I’m gone
They’ll still sing
I’ll be the place where we can go
I’ll be the strength that we can find
I’ll make a clear lake of my mind
I’ll be the one who always knows
What’s ahead and what’s behind
I’ll make a clear lake of my mind
I’ll be the one that lets us know
What we have when we have life
I’ll make a clear lake of my mind
“On the recording side, there was nothing special. It was just JB and I,” Elias tells me. “It was very heavy in the room.”
“It was the only finished thing that [I’d] written since dad got sick.” Brisendine points to the chorus of the song as a sort of aspirational pose, adopting his father’s strength in order to, in a way, preserve his spirit.
“The chorus in that song is like me being that because I know my dad is gonna die,” he says. “My dad has been that my entire life for me and my family and a bunch of other people. I was like ‘My dad is not gonna be here and that still has to exist.’ I have to do that. I want to do that, I want to be that. I don’t know that I’m so good at it, but I’m going to try to be what he was for as many people as I can for the rest of my life.”
“I remember finishing the song and JB had tears in his eyes and a huge smile on his face,” Elias recounts. “I was in awe that he nailed it. We listened to it and gave each other a huge hug like, we got everything that song needed to be in that one take. It was one of those magic moments that never happen when you’re making a record. When I listen to that song, it gives me chills.”
Tracking continued into the fall, and then in October 2017, Brother Hawk posted a snippet to Instagram with the caption “Today we finished tracking for The Clear Lake!!! In celebration, here’s a little taste. My Dad’s last song. Love all y’all – JB”
If I were writing this story as fiction, it would be too much. If I had my protagonist’s father drop dead moments after playing harmonica on a song called “The Black Dog,” any editor in the world would be like “Okay, that’s a little on the nose.” But that’s just how it happened.
A year after The Clear Lake album was released, Brother Hawk loaded into Elias’ freshly opened studio in Atlanta’s Little 5 Points neighborhood, Big Trouble Recording. It takes massive stones, as a rock band, to walk into a modern recording studio with all the capabilities of digital recording, non-linear editing, and virtually endless tracks, and say “Fuck all that, we’re cutting this live.”
But that’s what Brother Hawk did. And they did it with cameras rolling.
It feels appropriate that the first song released from Big Trouble Sessions, “Like Water,” directly addresses Joe and his death. And, continuing the theme of “White Oak,” shows Brisendine’s struggle with the burden of carrying on his father’s legacy.
You knew there’d be a day
When my world would turn away
You just poured out and rained down
All that I could take
I’ll hold on to every single drop of love you gave
Til I pour out and rain down all this world can take
It is an unlikely thing that a man who first picked up a guitar in the thick of the angst-ridden grunge era of the ‘90s would now be writing songs about striving to be a positive force in the world because he loves his dad, but that’s JB. One thing that sets Brother Hawk apart is that the roiling masculinity of their music is actually a positive thing. Their lyrics both assure the lonely that they are not so alone, and offer a way forward. There is a noticeable shift that happens in many of their songs, and you can hear it clearly in “Like Water.” The verse is full of lament, and here Brisendine sings of being held underwater, finding new lows beyond what he once thought was the bottom. Then, like a stage actor, he finds his light. “If I don’t go to where the light leaves the water,” he asks, “how can I use this to be proud?” And here, Evan Diprima crashes in like a wave breaking before Johns-Cooper’s organ washes through and this is it—this is the turn from despair to grace. And it’s the former that makes the latter so sweet. Then the great waves roll back, returning to the depths of the verse, only to find even greater heights when the chorus returns. It’s really something. Brother Hawk is real, and their music imparts a hopefulness that feels hard-earned.
This stands in contrast with the band’s choice of cover songs on Big Trouble Sessions—a shimmering and staid take on Alice in Chains’ pitch-black “Nutshell” and a surprisingly fresh performance of Soundgarden’s 1994 hit “Fell on Black Days.” It is especially stunning considering that in the early days of the band, Brisendine was reluctant to take on singing duties at all. To go from that to tackling a Chris Cornell number shows how thoroughly confident Brother Hawk are in their abilities.
The EP also includes a searing take on “Black Dog.” The song remains gripping, with Johns-Cooper putting in work on the Hammond to fill the space left by the absence of Joe’s harmonica. If you know what’s supposed to be there, it’s a heavy moment. But as Brother Hawk’s own songs demonstrate, the highs don’t exist without the lows.
Likewise, as JB points out, none of this—the songs, these albums, this band—would be here without Joe.
“If my dad wasn’t who he was, Brother Hawk wouldn’t exist,” he says. “I wouldn’t be a musician. I wouldn’t be an ambitious person. He is the source of everything.”
It’s not hard to draw a straight line from the lows of a stifling, conservative childhood to the highs of Brother Hawk. “At the very end of his life, he could live a lifelong dream,” Brisendine says. “And I’m lucky that I had him as a father because I never considered not living my dream. Being on stage with my dad is the single greatest joy in my life. Having that is everything to me now, especially because I won’t get anything else. I won’t have any more of that. I’m living off of that forever.”
Sitting across from him in his practice space, JB doesn’t struggle to hold back tears. He lets them come. Tears are good. His voice shakes but never loses its assuredness. Speaking about Joe and the music they made together, he emanates love just the way he does in song.
“The things that bring me comfort,” Brisendine says, “are the things that make it so hard.”
Brother Hawk will perform on Sat., Dec. 28 at the EARL alongside Dead Now and Thousandaire. Doors open at 8:30 p.m. Admission is $12. 21+ to enter.
More Info:
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Twitter: @BrotherHawkATL