Brothers Osborne Return to the Place that Made Them with “Watertown” – Garden & Gun

For their fifth album, Brothers Osborne went home. Watertown is named for Deale, Maryland, the blue-collar Chesapeake Bay town where TJ and John Osborne grew up crawling under houses to hand pipe fittings to their plumber father. Rather than just compiling new songs, the brothers built Watertown around a vision of the people, the water, and the hard work that shaped them. Produced by longtime collaborator Jay Joyce, it stands as their most personal collection yet. Songs like “Family Business” and the closing title track (both penned by John) are sharply drawn and lived-in, anchored by TJ’s singular baritone, warm and weathered as a dock piling, and John’s guitar, which can snarl, sting, or sigh.

Watertown is out today, and we caught up with John to talk about their Maryland upbringing, family, and why they wanted to revisit those memories now. “After traveling the world multiple times over, we were able to view our town through a new lens,” he says. “It gave us a newfound love and respect for the place we come from.”

Watertown feels like such a particularly heartfelt record. What was the thinking going in?

We had a pretty clear vision early on for the message and overall aesthetic. This one we treated more conceptually. It’s not a concept record in the conventional sense, but everything relates to each other within the overall vision. A lot of the songs were written from the perspective of where we grew up, the type of people who grew up around us, and the geography of growing up in a water town—the different ways of life and experiences we had compared to people who didn’t grow up in a town like that.

It contains some of your most vivid characters and introspective writing. What was it like looking back now?

I left Deale, Maryland, when I was eighteen, and TJ was a little bit younger. Like any teenager, you pine to leave because your town feels like the smallest dot on the map, and you want to see the world and experience everything you’ve wanted. [Now] we could view our childhood almost as if it were an eight-millimeter film.

How so?

When you have enough time to step back, you can see it as a watcher rather than the narrator—someone viewing the film instead of starring in it. You get a ten-thousand-foot perspective. There’s a song called “Tough Kid” about the first fight I ever got into. I was maybe eleven. At the time, it felt traumatic, and you only see it from your own perspective. But after years of separating myself from it, I started to see it more objectively. The boy I got into a fistfight with had a really tough upbringing and a tough life. I understand that now, and I’ve grown to have love and empathy for him. At the time, all you could see was a kid who’d been picking on you, coming after you at the bus stop, and you’re just trying to fight for your life.

Photo: Larry Niehues

The brothers at the Deale fire station in their hometown.

What was life like in Deale?

Deale is a working-class town. It’s a mix of people from the red side of the political spectrum, the blue side, and the middle, and they all coexist, drink at the same bars, and work together. It’s a lot of tradesmen. Our dad was a plumber, and a lot of his friends were in the trades, too—electricians, carpenters, you name it. So we grew up learning how to work very, very hard. I can’t guarantee that I’m the most talented person in any room, or the most gifted, or the best at anything. But I can guarantee that I’m one of the hardest-working people in any room. That’s how I was raised, and I think it has a lot to do with where we are today.

One of my favorite songs on the record is “Family Business.” How autobiographical is it?

Extremely. Our dad was self-employed and brought us out to work with him on weekends so we could make a little money. His business was called Osborne Plumbing and Heating, so it was a family business. Fast-forward to today, and my brother and I are in Brothers Osborne, which is also a family business. As songwriters, we love a good double entendre, so I wanted to flip the idea of minding your own business on its head.

As a songwriter in Nashville, you’re led to believe you have to write as broadly as possible to reach as many people as you can. That’s true to an extent, but on this record, I wanted to write more directly and literally. There’s a run of lines in that song—“a mama you’d want to take home to mama, a daddy with a girlfriend who loves marijuana, a sister who took a swing at a no-show father”—and those are all very true. The chorus says we fight like junkyard dogs and fall out about every other Christmas, which is true. It’s more like every four or five Christmases.

Family being family.

It’s just family. [laughs]

You wrote “High” with your wife, Lucie Silvas. How does writing with her compare to a Music Row co-write?

My wife is English, and they don’t write the way we do in Nashville. In London, they’ll sometimes start at ten at night and write into the morning. Nashville has turned it into a business, into a job. I like that, especially as a dad with kids; it gives you some routine. But it can be stifling creatively because maybe you’re just not in the mood at that minute. A lot of the songs we’ve worked on together were written over weeks because we’d chip away at them between taking the kids to school and picking them up. It comes very naturally. This is the first song we’ve written together that we have cut. She jokes that it’s only taken a decade. I started it and knew it had legs, but I struggled to find the end. She jumped in…and that’s how we finished the song. She’s a creative force, and I should certainly utilize her badassery more. But usually by the end of the day, we’re just exhausted and falling asleep to Netflix.

Your twins are three-and-a-half now. How’s that going?

My daughter basically co-parents our son. He’s completely useless. She’ll get his shoes for him, or he’ll say he wants milk, and she’ll go to the kitchen and get it. I’m like, “Who is this person?” She was born a minute after him, so technically he’s her older brother. But I feel like if we left her to it, she could run the entire house by herself.

TJ has said that with Watertown, you have nothing left to prove. Do you agree?

I think TJ and I are different in that respect. He’s correct that we don’t really have anything to prove to ourselves. We’ve achieved way more than I would have ever expected as a kid. This is beyond my wildest dreams. But I do feel like we still have something to prove to the world, and I like that feeling. It’s just how my mind works. It gives me the inspiration I need to keep pushing, creating, and trying to outdo myself. I feel like we perform better when we’re in second place. I like being the underdog. It’s what I’m used to.

Do you have a favorite song on the album?

I love the title track because it takes me back home every time I listen. It’s the last song on the album. It’s ethereal, it’s a ballad, and it’s all the things you’re not supposed to write in the writers’ room. It has very literal lyrics, and it breaks all the rules, which is why I wrote it myself. My brother sings it like he wrote it because he lived those experiences. One line mentions that we spread our grandmother’s ashes in the Chesapeake Bay. It was a very hard day and a tough experience, but beautiful. It will always be one of the most personal songs we’ve ever recorded, regardless of its chart success. And I think that’s what creating and songwriting is all about.