To celebrate the Brewers’ historic regular season, local musician Nate Gibson released “Fear the Beer: A Musical Salute to the Milwaukee Brewers.” It’s a new album of 11 original country songs, plus a recording of the “Beer Barrel Polka” — a fan favorite the Brewers play during the seventh-inning stretch.
“I think these songs are very unique to not just the Brewers and this season, but their country music connections,” Gibson told WPR’s “Wisconsin Today.”
After first getting the idea to make the album about a month ago, Gibson worked around the clock for several weeks to put everything together in time for the playoffs. Along the way, he collaborated with musicians around the state, including Art Stevenson on harmonica and Randall Finley on fiddle. Gibson’s nephew Ethan Gibson, a live audio engineer who fronts a heavy metal band, mixed the tracks and played a guitar solo on one of the songs.
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Calling it a “100 percent rush job,” Nate Gibson said it’s the fastest he has ever written and recorded a full album.
“This is maybe my ninth album that I’ve made. I’ve gone to studios and I’ve had full bands, and you rehearse for a long time, and you make sure it’s ready, and you spend a long time mixing,” he said. “This is a bedroom project.”
When he’s not writing Brewers-themed songs at a breakneck pace, Gibson fronts Nate Gibson & the Stardazers, a local band that plays country, honky-tonk, rockabilly and bluegrass tunes from the Starday Records label. He is also an archivist at the Mills Music Library at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and hosts a long-running classic country music show at community radio station WORT 89.9 FM.
Gibson said he hopes the album can be a fun “soundtrack to the playoffs” for Brewers fans.
“I don’t have any grand expectations. But if this means that the Brewers heard this and they liked it, and I got to perform at a Brewers game — even in the lobby, in the bar,” he said. “That would be a thrill for me.”
Gibson joined “Wisconsin Today” in the studio to talk about his love for the Brewers and the joy he found in putting this album together.
The following was edited for brevity and clarity.
Rob Ferrett: What sparked this for you — recording not one or two songs, but a whole album dedicated to the Brewers?
Nate Gibson: I’m familiar with a lot of those songs about the Brewers from the ’80s. There was “Brewer Fever,” “Turnin’ Up the Heat,” “Brewers Have It All,” “Brewers All the Way.” And I thought, “There haven’t been a lot of songs recently about the Brewers.” I’m a country musician and I host a classic country music show, and I started looking into all the connections between country music and the Brewers. And I got a little carried away.
Charley Pride was an honorary Brewer and I found these postcards of him at Brewers spring training in ’71, ’72 and ’73, and I was kind of floored by that. And then I just started making all these connections. Hank the Dog was the Brewers mascot for a while, and I thought, “Well, Hank is a popular country name. I can certainly work with that.”
We were just at the game the other day — when Brandon Woodruff comes in, he’s coming into Luke Bryan. Cody Jinks is (Jared) Koenig’s walk-up. Johnny Cash is used for Andrew Vaughn’s walk-up. And I started thinking, “Wow, there’s a lot of country here. What if I wrote a country song about the Brewers?” And after I wrote one, I thought I could probably do two. And then I told my wife that night, “I bet I could do a whole album,” and she challenged me to do it.
RF: I imagine as you started to think, “OK, what are my songs going to be about?” Well, you have to include a Bob Uecker song.
NG: That was one of the first ones that I thought of. And Bob Uecker was the reason I became a Brewers fan. … When I moved here — which was eight and a half years ago, to Wisconsin — I thought, “Well, I love the Red Sox, but Bob Uecker is so great.” And I could really just listen to him tell stories all the time. So I started just listening at night to the Brewers games and loving them, and eventually started going to Brewers games. He won me over, so I wanted to write a tribute for him.
RF: You’ve got another person honored in this album. The song is “This Bud’s For You,” but it’s not about Bud the beer — it’s about former MLB Commissioner Bud Selig, who brought the Brewers to Milwaukee.
NG: I just thought it would be hilarious. It’s not really needling Milwaukee fans, but it’s funny for those who would hear a song about Schlitz and Blatz and Pabst and Miller High Life and all these brews (from Milwaukee), and then have the song called “This Bud’s For You.” It just seems so not right. Yeah, it’s a tribute to Bud Selig and all the great stuff he did for Milwaukee.
RF: So do you have a next Brewers project in mind?
NG: I think making an entire country album about the Brewers is somewhat niche because you have to find the Brewers fans who are country music fans, as well. But it’s a slice of me. I’m doing this because right now, it’s easy to get bogged down, to get stressed, to feel anxiety and to read the news and just withdraw and become reclusive. And this was my way of celebrating what brings me joy. And so it’s an insight into my life.
I love country music. I love the Brewers. And I don’t see myself necessarily doing another one, because I also love root beer, so maybe the next thing I do is a concept album about different root beers.
