Q&A with Brian Johanson, Lead Singer and Songwriter of Fort Collins Band Sugar Britches
Since the start of the lockdown, the music industry, like many other businesses during this time, has been hit hard by the pandemic. With the necessary restrictions of occupancy or the closures of venues in general, musicians have had to get creative to do the thing they love. For Brian Johanson, lead singer of the Fort Collins honky-tonk band Sugar Britches, he has been surprisingly busy despite the current climate. I got the chance to speak to him over Zoom last week, and get a musician’s take on what it has been like to live out his passion during a pandemic.
What inspired you to start a band and how did you start?
I started playing out in public when I was at CSU when I was like 19 or 20. Right after I graduated CSU in 2006, I had just started a little bluegrass band and I played with that group for about 5 years until I just couldn’t do it anymore, I was too much of a mess back then. So I took about a 5 year break and back in 2015 I started playing music again. I did solo singer-songwriter stuff for a few years in Fort Collins and then I meet my band mate Josh and we started Sugar Britches together in 2017, and just last January we had Ben O’Connor come in on the upright bass. We were doing just duo stuff for a few years, and we recorded our first album, with a group of other musicians too, but it was pretty much just Josh and I. We were going out and playing just as a duo, and just this last year we have been playing as a trio.
As far as Sugar Britches goes, I took a long break in music and when I got back into it I was a little rusty, but I was able to start writing again solo and slowly getting back into it and getting my confidence back up. I meet Josh, the electric guitarist, who has a lot of the really fun licks and riffs on all of the songs, and he’s been so much fun to play with. So when I started playing with him, he really took a lot of the songs in a really fun direction, and that is what makes Sugar Britches. As a writer I write a bunch of sad, kind of folksy country songs that are really dark in a way, but Josh ads a lot of light and flavor to it with guitar.
When we were first starting to play we were trying to come up with a name and one of our friends who is a local DJ at KRFC, she just always called us her little sugar britches so we thought we would try that name out and it stuck. It was either that or Cousin Lovers so… we thought that was a funny name too.
Me and Josh were both kind of solo artists, Josh had been playing guitar for lots of people, and he is such an amazing guitarist. When we started playing together we had such a great response at our shows and a lot more people started coming. Even within the first year we made that album we got a pretty good response from that. We got to play down at the Denver Westward Showcase where we were nominated for best band, and we were nominated for best new country band by Fort Collins Musicians Association. We had lots of cool accolades, I have been playing for a long time and those are pretty big deals to me. We have just been able to kind of keep the ball rolling.
I have been writing a bunch of stuff too and hopefully we will be able to get our second album out. That is kind of the goal now, get a new album out and go start playing again.
Do you think anything on the second album is going to have anything on your experiences with Covid?
My first thought was that everybody is going to have a song called the “Quarantine Blues” and I don’t want to sing about this. The closest I got was we got asked to do a political song for a friend of ours in Denver who put this compilation album together called Politico, which is Colorado musicians doing political songs. I thought well, I would love to try to write a political song, I wasn’t a very political person, but I wrote a song in my car one morning called “Everything Sucks.” We recorded it and it is on that little political anthology, and it is very explicit. It has a little bit to do with Covid and just about the political season of last year and just how everything sucks. It is definitely not radio friendly but I would love to put it on the album.
What drives your music and what is your process?
That’s always kind of hard one because it comes and goes so sporadically. Some times one day I will wake up and try to write some stuff, but then sometimes that feels kind of forced, and then other times I’ll have a bunch of post-it notes all over my house and I’ll write a few little lines here and there and I’ll just come back to them. I have actually written a few good songs that way, of just little snippets of little things here and there. Then other times I will just be playing guitar and the whole song just kind of spits out in about five minutes, and generally those are the best ones.
That’s pretty impressive that you can do that though, I feel that for most people that would be kind of hard, right?
I don’t know, I think everyone is a little jealous and busy comparing themselves to one another, because I look at other people who write and sing and I’m just like how do you do that? How do you write all these songs? I try to be a little more disciplined but it all depends on what comes out and what you are proud of and what you will actually play in front of other people. I have written lots of songs but there are only a few that I will sing in front of other people proudly.
It kind of varies, sometimes I will write the music first and then I will put the lyrics to it, or sometimes I will write all of the lyrics out in 10–20 minutes and I will just grab a guitar and put music to it.
So who inspires you and your music?
That is a hard question too just because there are so many at this point and my brain feels so full and a lot of the time, I don’t even listen to a lot of new music because my brain feels so full of music. But I would probably say Gillian Welch and Conor Oberst from Bright Eyes are two of my biggest songwriting inspirations, and John Prine, those are probably the top three for me and how I write songs and then put music to them. Once the music all kind of gets together it becomes a weird mish-mash of old honky-tonk like Merle Haggard, Waylon Jennings and Junior Brown a little bit too.
What is it like being a musician right now? What are the biggest drawbacks? Are there any positives at the moment?
Yeah I would say there are still lots of positives, I know in talking to a lot of musicians this last year, a few of my friends are like “maybe I should not be doing this” and “maybe this is not a good thing to be doing.” But for me it has always been a good place to kind of air out my feelings and it is very therapeutic and cathartic. First and foremost it is good to write stuff and express yourself and sing it. As you can see too, we love painting in our house, we loving doing art and if we weren’t doing music we would be doing something else artistically to express ourselves. So I think that is always a positive, just getting all of your feelings out in a way and trying to relate to people. That is usually what I try to tell people. I am writing and hopefully people can relate to it and that is a connection we can have with each other and with humanity.
Especially while we were all locked up inside last year, even just doing a live stream or a show outside, just having people be there and be so grateful for music — that is one of the biggest joys I have seen out of music and in a long time too.
Did you get the chance to play outside last summer?
We did. Once the lockdown happened in March, of course we just kept cancelling shows left and right. We had pretty much the whole year booked up, and we just had to cancel everything, or just take it week by week, but IT was still pretty bad. Eventually we got to do the drive in, the FoCoMX did the drive-in shows at the Holiday Twin, that was our first one after about three months.
We were all pretty nervous about even doing that. We just weren’t sure if we should be doing it, and we didn’t want to encourage anything. We were also trying to look at what the CDC was saying, what the governor was saying, and what we could all do within the regulations. It seemed like the best thing we could do was playing outside with lots of space, and we decided we could probably do that. It seemed like every opportunity we had was outside and it was gorgeous around Colorado and Wyoming, where we played most of the time, so we had really good opportunities for people to be spaced out, wearing masks, and at least be doing the best we could do with all of our knowledge. So we were able to keep fairly busy, but not as busy as we would have been. It was nice to be able to get out a little bit, you know.
We did lots of private parties for people, wedding receptions, lots of stuff just outside where people could be kind of spaced out and it was good for businesses where we were but everywhere was at limited capacity. So it was nice, but I think the year before 2020 we were averaging about 10 shows a month, which was the busiest I’ve ever been. Then during Covid we played from about maybe late June to October, and then it was just too cold. We still don’t really want to play inside but we have a few small indoor shows coming up. We’re going to do one at The Forge, March 7th, that will be on livestream, and a place in Denver on March 26th at the Rockabillies.
What have you been doing in the meantime?
I was really fortunate because I was able to work in an essential job this whole time as well. I have just been going a little crazy without being able to play music, but there so many people in our community that music was all they were doing for money. But I do think the Fort Collins community really stepped up and everybody kind of took care of one another, I know that the Bohemian Foundation offered grants to musicians in money and scholarships, and then Odell and New Belgium offered some relief packages as well. Some of my friends got those and it was a really cool thing and I think a lot of places tried to do that. Being in the Fort Collins community I really have seen that some of the bigger businesses and bigger music venues really have tried to take care of the artists, which I thought was really cool. I saw lots of people do live streams and get donations for other people which is a really neat thing as well.
Do you think Covid-19 will leave any longstanding changes to the music industry and how people consume music?
I think so, at the very least I feel like we are all a bit more well versed in the live stream and in that technology. Even if you do a small show or something you can have the technology and the audio equipment to live stream it and get it to more people so that is a definite positive.
In the big picture, with larger concerts and larger venues, I would hope that they will be appreciating artists a little more and taking care of them when they book shows, as opposed to booking someone at a huge venue and then all of the ticket sales go to the ticket seller. I hope that will change and they will have a little bit more appreciation for the musicians. I hope to see musicians get more fairly treated in the end.
What do you miss the most or the least about live music?
Probably the thing I miss the most is interacting with my band mantes and the audience. There is just an energy that your draw from the people in the crowd, I can sit at home and do a live stream in the kitchen or in my bathroom or whatever but it is just not the same. You can be playing a show and you can mess up or have a flub or whatever but just that energy you are getting from people is a one-of-a-kind thing. The way you play off your bandmates is a really big thing, you just have these insanely magical moments when you are in front of other people doing it. You can kind of have that alone when you are playing and you are writing but ultimately when your are doing this stuff you want to be sharing it with people. That is definitely what I miss the most and am looking forward to doing again.
All of it is just such an interesting part of the process, of course you don’t miss going out and playing a show where there is only like two or three people out there, but even then I feel like you could draw lots of good positives on just being able to play a show. Even if there are only a few people and you’re like “hey at least I’ll get a good little practice in.”
I do kind of enjoy it all and maybe I’m just missing it too much but it does take a toll on you sometimes where you will get tired and you get burnt out, but I definitely feel ready to go back at it.
What is the first thing you are going to do when and if everything opens back up again?
I would love to just throw a big party where it doesn’t cost any money and we can just get everybody out there, get a sound system, get all of my musician friends and just be like “hey lets just all play all day long” and let everybody come and eat and drink. We’ll all just play music and it’ll be a good time. No structure or anything just playing, have fun, and be together. That is really what I would love to do.
