Hunter Brothers on Farming and “Peace, Love & Country Music”

Hunter Brothers, consisting of real life brothers, Luke, J.J., Ty, Brock, and Dusty, hail from the small town of Shaunavon, Saskatchewan. The brothers still call Shaunavon home and still farm the same land they grew up on. 

With an impressive list of CCMA and Juno nominations, as well as 23 SCMA wins, including Group of the Year, Fan’s Choice Entertainer of the Year, and Album of the Year, Hunter Brothers are proving that you can successfully make your dreams come true while still staying true to your roots.

We chatted with the brothers before they took the main stage at Cavendish Beach Music Festival earlier this month to talk about farming and what their new single “Peace, Love & Country Music” means to them.

How does it feel to be back on the road and playing in front of a live audience again?

*hoops and hollers erupt from the band* 

Ty: That about sums it up.

The pandemic put live performance at a stand still for two years. Did you find the return to touring a hard adjustment or did it feel like you never stopped?

Ty: I think the first show it felt like the rust was on the machine a little bit, but then actually last weekend when we played three shows in four days it was like “we’re back!” We are back and we are just so excited! There is a part of it that you’re more engaged than ever before just because all that energy has been stored up for two years now.

A music career is one thing, but juggling a music career and farming is a whole other ballgame. How do you do it?

Teleportation… cloning. (laughing)

J.J.: In all honesty, it makes life very busy. We’re not going to beat around the bush on that one. We got off the road doing three shows in four nights last weekend and it was raining and we thought we’d have a day and a half before we’d have to jump on a plane to come out here and there was stuff going on: Brock had to get the crop-duster ready, crop-dusted until 10:30 at night, put the plane away, we packed late night because we were working on other things at the same time, left at midnight to drive through the night to get to the airport in Calgary, got to the airport [and] flew out here. We’re going back for a day and a half until we have to be at Stampede. It’s just constantly trying to keep things afloat and we have families as well and they need time and we love being with them too, so it’s constantly working at it to make sure that we have space and time. Saying that, we love everything we’re doing; we feel so blessed to have the farm and so blessed to be able to do this [and] come on the road, spend time with folks like yourselves and everybody here at Cavendish. We wouldn’t be doing it without [our families] and their support.

You just released a new single “Peace, Love & Country Music” on June 10th. Can you tell us a little bit about the writing process for that song?

Ty: It actually happened very quickly. I would say it was one of our quicker writes. We walked into the write with our producer, Seth Mosley and a writer by the name of James McNair, who is also out of Nashville. Love those guys! We were just talking about how easy it is to come out of a season where it’s very stressful, people have a lot going on so how do we look at the things that ground us as human beings that we can all rally around. This was kind of the counter-narrative to the stress and saying let’s come together over things that we can all get on board with: Peace, Love and Country Music. That’s a subjective term for some people, maybe it’s a different type of music, but nonetheless music. So peace, love and music point blank. It’s just things at the end of the day we can rally around.

I love the idea of the “Peace, Love & Country Music” Week that you did following the release. Were there any random acts of kindness that you experienced or witnessed that week that stood out to you?

Ty: I have a good group of people that I absolutely love that helped me through the last year at the local pharmacy (Jay’s Pharmacy). My wife owns an independent coffee shop up in Shaunavon and [Jay’s] support us really well so we were like we have to take the coffees back to you guys. They’ve been working their butts off, so that was something that happened where we just went in and took coffee into the crew there. It’s just little things like that that then hopefully enable other people to say, “hey, let’s do something for the next person”.

J.J.: I think there are constantly things that are going on and we want to encourage people to do that, but it’s also to shed light on what is already happening. We come from a small community where it’s such a neighbourhood, friendly community feel. It was my birthday yesterday; I got messages from people all over the place. We’ve got, she used to be our neighbour, we call her Grandma Nola, she’s not our grandma, she’s not related to us at all, I got the sweetest messages from her, her family, her kids, and it’s just a reminder that we’re here for each other and that’s really what we want to shed light on. How can we support each other? We understand there are going to be differences with people; that’s part of being human, but at the same time, how can we bond together, encourage each other, and how can we find those points of connectivity and points of commonality as well and love on each other.

Listen to “Peace, Love & Country Music” and other Hunter Brothers music on Spotify.

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