A New Kind of Country

Reagan Richards and Gordon Brown have always been pursuing music. Now, the New Jersey natives are putting their own modern twist on classic themes, with the unique sounds of Williams Honor.

“My mom was a big band singer so it was music all the way,” Reagan says. “There was no other option,” Gordon says of his pursuit of a music career. Both were in other bands and musical opportunities when they were asked, independently of knowing each other, to perform at a Hurricane Sandy benefit back home in New Jersey.

“We hit it off and realized there’s not really a lot of people from Asbury Park that love country music, why don’t we get together and start writing and see what happens?” Gordon says.

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““It was very organic,” Reagan continues. “It wasn’t a thing where we said, ‘Okay, this is a thing we have to do.’ We just started writing songs not for us, for other people. And then one day it just became a thing where we’re writing something and we were like, let’s try something. We just started to write these songs and we had collections of songs that we were like, let’s do something with this.””

Their instincts were strong; from their debut album, their lead single charted top 30. They’re already working towards record #2. “We’ve got a lot of songs we’ve already written and it’s going to be a process again where we’re like, okay, we have all these songs, which ones are gonna go on there,” Gordon says.

“That is how we crafted our first record,” Reagan continues. They invited fans to dictate the direction of the record, with shows where they invited their fans to listen to advance material. “They told us the ones they liked and that’s what we ended up putting on our record.”

And while they may not always agree creatively, the process is something they love. “We’ll have an idea and some of the greatest arguments we have is about ideas that we have about these songs,” Reagan says. “He’ll say all the time, ‘This is the stuff I love to argue about,’ because you’ll both have a vision of something.” Their debut album has influences spanning Dolly Parton and Lady Antebellum, something that very much reflects their modern and classic roots.

“We wake up in the morning thinking about the next song, the next record, the next show,” Gordon says. “That’s just because we’ve done it our whole lives. But when you see the real connection, it is so beyond,” he continues. They talk about the fans that approach them at shows, and how much each person means to them. “It just creates this incredible energy that becomes a big snowball.”

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