Nightfall headliner is Americana with country roots

A live performance by Hope Country.

When he was a teenager, singer/songwriter Brent Johnson couldn't wait to escape the drudgery of life in the country.

"We had to milk cows twice a day. Milk the cows, feed the cows, feed the calves, do field work," he says of his responsibilities on his parents' 500-acre dairy farm in Osseo, Wis., a town of fewer than 2,000 near the Minnesota border.

In 2000, while attending a Blink 182 concert at a minor-league baseball stadium in St. Paul, Minn., Johnson, then 17, decided that music was his way out.

"I guess I didn't want to work on a farm anymore, I guess," he laughs, his words coming with an easygoing lightness and tinged by a noticeable Midwestern accent.

After the concert, Johnson began touring the country, singing in metal and punk bands. The money wasn't great and the intensity of the singing shredded his vocal cords, but it offered the escape he sought, and the community of fans was supportive.

In 2011, however, Johnson decided a change was in order. Surprisingly, after years of trying to escape his country roots, he turned back to his rural upbringing and founded Hope Country. The new project, he says, was inspired, at least in part, by the country artists he grew up listening to on the radio.

"My mom always thought that the cows milked more if you listened to country music," he says. "Hope Country isn't straight country music, but it's a lighter side of music compared to a hardcore or metal band."

The transition has taken some getting used to, but ultimately, he says, Hope Country offers a more fulfilling way to express himself.

"It's a bit harder, in that in punk music you didn't have to sound good. As long as you moved around a lot and had a lot of energy, that's all that mattered a lot of times," Johnson laughs. "In this, you have to keep people engaged by making them feel something. When that does happen, it's great."

His approach to doing that, he says, is to overcome the emotional reservation that predominates among Midwestern farmers and learn to open himself up - to be transparent, he says.

"Onstage, I'll talk about the farm and my life and not have a filter, just try to be as real as possible in whatever ways I can," he says. "I don't know if it's authenticity or what, but I try to get as deep as I can when I write songs. Farmers over there are a no-emotion type of people. I try to write and get my emotions out, so it's a little bit easier to talk about."

On Friday, June 24, Johnson and his band will bring Hope Country to the stage at Miller Plaza as this week's Nightfall headliner.

In the last few years, Johnson says he's struggled at times with the transition to Americana music.

Contradicting advice from his friends that he should have built an online reputation first or solicited crowdfunding to pay for his tour, Johnson says he can't take the easy path.

Even though he's left farm life behind, Johnson says he's still holds fast to a farmer's work ethic, even if he's harvesting fans now instead of cattle feed.

"I didn't want to get big on the internet and then go out and not have a connection that was built off of hard work," he says. "It's really rewarding to put in hard work and see it pay off by just grinding and continuing to do it and put out music.

"I want to earn the fan base by going out and not making any money for a while and putting my money into it to plant the seed and see the crop grow."

Contact Casey Phillips at cphillips@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6205. Follow him on Twitter at @PhillipsCTFP.