Growing up in the UK, I wasn’t often exposed to Nashville-based musicians. Having just played at London’s Albert Hall, however, is anything but a US-only band. The blissful mix of their voices, beautiful but often dark melodies, and brave production choices all create a soundscape that the band term “Cinematic Americana”. I think that sums up their music beautifully.
When not performing, the duo spends as much time as possible with their Irish Wolfhound, Faolan, who recently alerted them to a terrifying home invasion that was occurring as they were home.
I had the privilege of a virtual catch-up with the adorably in-love husband and wife singer-songwriter duo. Brandon Robert Young and ‘Nashville’ Actor Clare Bowen joined me from their home, not so coincidentally in Nashville, Tennessee!
Greg: It’s great to meet you both, and I have to say, It’s so special to meet some real lyricists! Digging into song meanings and deconstructing lyrics is one of the rabbit holes I like to go down, so forgive me if I use the interview to get some insider information or to confirm some of my suspicions about the meanings of your more cryptic songs.
I’ve taken the time to listen to your catalog and it’s a real sonic landscape, and like I said, some incredible songwriting so, yeah, fanboy moment over!
Brandon: It’s great to meet you too, Greg, and thanks for that. (Brandon laughs, I’m sure politely, such is his instant likeability and positive energy, matched only by that of Clare)
Clare: Yes, thanks for the kind words!
Greg: Well since we are a dog magazine let’s start with a simple question. Tell us about your dog! He’s an Irish wolfhound, correct?
Clare: That’s right, we pretty much always rescue our pets, and with Faolan, we got him from someone who had planned to keep him, but just had too much on their plate for such a specimen of a dog. We love him to bits, he’s such a loving, wise soul and we just had to take him home once we’d met him.
Brandon: He’s magical, really.
Greg: He’s in one of your videos, isn’t he?
Clare: Yeah, I think he’s lying on the floor with me, which is typical. He’s a shadow, especially when he knows you need him. He won’t jump up or lick you, he’ll just kind of come up to you real close when he knows you’re upset. Such a beautiful old soul.
Greg: They just know when we’re sad, our dogs, and I think they feed off our mood, too. I’m terrified of making my dogs anxious, which, there you go, I just proved that I am guilty to a degree.
Brandon: Absolutely they do. And animals like Faolan are just such majestic animals that as well as lifting your mood, they’re just a privilege to be around. When he’s curled up sleeping and I just think how incredible it is to get to share a space with this majestic, gentle giant.
Greg: Amazing breed, he’s gorgeous. Thanks so much for agreeing to share your time to talk about Faolan, and of course your overall love of dogs and phenomenal music!
Clare: Absolutely, thanks for the opportunity. Whenever we get the chance to raise awareness for dog causes or to play at an event supporting dog welfare, we’re there!
Greg: We’ll definitely get back to Faolan and dogs more broadly, but I’m dying to talk about your single Dangerous Love, which I’ve listened to on repeat for the last week.
Firstly, the guitar is incredible. That tone! It reminds me of Jeff Buckley. Melodically and from a production standpoint, it’s a real sonic experience before you even get to the lyrics. That Hammond organ, too, what an absolutely beautiful soundscape you created.
Brandon: Thank you! Speaking to the guitar, that’s our good friend Colin Linden.
Clare: Yes, that’s right, he played guitar on all the Nashville recordings too.
Brandon: He’s a brilliant guitarist, truly world-class. He’s played for Dylan…
Clare: Toured the world with us…
Brandon: He’s toured the world with us with the band, he wrote “Remedy” with the band, he’s toured with Rick Denko, Levon Helm and so many more. He’s such a treasure, so any time we have the opportunity, we have him play guitar, or frankly anything with strings...
Clare: Or just to hang out and drink wine, he’s such a great guy…
Brandon: Exactly, or just to drink wine. Any time with Colin is a day or evening well spent. We’ll definitely pass your kind words along to Colin.
View this post on Instagram
Greg: Please do! but only if you think a Jeff Buckley comparison is appropriate.
Clare: I think he’ll be alright with that (chuckles kindly, because of course people like being compared to Jeff Buckley!)
Greg: I also got Nick Cave vibes, specifically the darkness of “Red Right Hand”.
Clare: That’s only one of my favorite artists and songs! We’ll take that for sure.
Greg: It feels like a beautifully dark discussion on how you’d do absolutely anything to protect your soulmate from harm. You’d even betray your usual morals if need be. How did I do on the meaning?
Clare: That’s exactly what it’s about.
Brandon: One of the things that’s a through-line with the new record is that these are all unique and individual experiences that we’ve written into songs. Dangerous Love specifically came out of a serious encounter we had during a home invasion. It was midnight on a Sunday night, and we were home.
Greg: What!?
Brandon: Yeah, it was a very, very traumatic experience.
Clare: (to Brandon) Faolan was the reason you checked the house.
Brandon: Yes, our dog is the reason I opened the bedroom door and went out into the house to check what was going on, he was freaking out before we even knew someone was there.
Clare: He was so Agitated. He’s an Irish Wolfhound and very alert and protective when needed.
Brandon: Clare and Faolan were behind the bedroom door, and I went downstairs and wasn’t twelve steps from the door when a man broke through the door and entered our house. I made it back upstairs. We blockaded ourselves in our bedroom and called 911.
To cut a long story short, he spent about ten minutes trying to break down the door, and thankfully the police arrived just in time. Clare tells the story much better than me, but I will say it was immensely terrifying…we were up until 4 am by the time the detectives had left, and then Clare got an alert that we had a session booked with our producer, Sean McConnell.
Greg: Must have been just what you felt like doing!
Brandon: Right, well we went to Sean’s, obviously both a mess and after telling him about the ordeal and he’d made a pot of tea, we just sat and talked for 2 or 3 hours. He grabbed a guitar and said, “What if it sounded something like this!” So, in about 30 to 45 minutes, we’d written the ordeal into Dangerous Love.
Greg: Wow, straight off the back of such trauma, and y’all immediately turned the experience into music, unbelievable.
Brandon: Exactly, it was one of those songs where we knew we had to tell that story. We had to record it.
It’s also a call to attention for people struggling with mental health. In the months following the attack, I had horrible nightmares, issues being in the dark, and all kinds of emotions welling up inside me. So, I started in on therapy.
I met with someone regularly, I spoke to some law enforcement agents who were very encouraging, helping me learn and grow by how they teach people to get through such situations.
So, we want to use that song to encourage people, and to let them know that if there is a mountain in front of them that seems too high to climb, it’s not a weakness to reach out for help, but rather an incredible strength. The song isn’t just about storytelling, but also hopefully a vehicle that encourages people to seek help.
Clare: If you can put something good into the world from something terrible, I think you should. We’d talked about what we’d do if this ever happened, thinking it never would.
So accordingly we were shielding behind the bed, with Brandon on one side of me and Faolan on the other, and I was holding onto Faolan because his breed, while gentle, will totally F someone up if the owner is in danger, it’s typically the only time Irish Wolf Hounds are aggressive, ever, but from his head to his tail, he kept making himself bigger and bigger by raising his hair, and (breaks up with emotion) I realized that he was pushing me behind the bed, trying to guard me.
But I wasn’t going to let him run to that door because he would, no doubt about it. It’s pretty wild, he’s a magical guy.
Greg: So sorry that you went through that, and I’ve not met Faolan but from your description, he’s pretty magical. And with respect to getting counseling, as a long-term sufferer of mental illness, I’m with you on the advocacy. It’s also really clever to reach out to Law Enforcement to establish other tools to make you feel even more comfortable, especially after such a deeply traumatic event.
Brandon: Yes, we’re fortunate to have some ex-special forces and various law enforcement officers in our circle that we can turn to for guidance, people who deal with the practical application of the skills, helping them deal with situations that I pray to God we never face. It’s just looking through a different lens and adding to the way in which a therapist approaches the problem.
A therapist understands how we work, mentally, and chemically, and while I don’t understand the science behind it, and don’t have the extensive training they have, I trusted the process, and over the course of several months, I started to feel like I could function as a human again. The Law Enforcement agents that I spoke with helped me from a practical application of skills standpoint.
Clare: If we can recycle that experience in a way that helps others who might be in a dark place seek help, it creates some positivity from the experience.
Greg: I really appreciate you sharing the background to the song. The Album in general to me feels like a celebration of finding each other, of finding a soulmate, peppered with songs of loss and a host of other subjects. Like in “Water to Wine”, I took from that the notion that it’s a miracle to find that one person to make and share a life with.
Brandon: Two for two on the song meanings, and yes there is a lot of joy to the album too!
Greg: So proud of myself, but I feel that was a more obvious one, and I don’t trust myself guessing the meaning of some of the more cryptic stuff.
Can you tell me a bit about your influences and if being from different parts of the World caused you to have different inspirations for your musical journeys? Because your style is self-described as Cinematic….um, you’ll have to help me!
Clare: Cinematic Americana.
Greg: That’s right, so embarrassing, was on the tip of my tongue. So, what flows into that rather niche sound?
Clare: While I have musical influences, I think because I’m an Actor and I’ve kind of dragged Brandon into that world, rather than specific inspirations, I view all the performances as storytelling, just in different formats. So, in that respect, the audience is the inspiration.
We try to create that immersive experience for the listener that quite often turns into a sort of conversation. We didn’t know what else to call the experience, so we termed it Cinematic Americana. We want it to be bigger than just a song that’s 3 minutes and 30 seconds long, you know?
Greg: I do, it feels like a sound immersion to me.
Clare: Exactly, and I mean if you’re not affecting people with the music you produce, what are you doing?
Greg: Love that.
Clare: But your influences. (turns to Brandon).
Brandon: Yeah, my influences are, you know, rooted in the fact that while I grew up in the Northeast, my parents were big fans of traditional country, oldies, and gospel music. I feel like those are all elements that were imprinted on me from a very young age, from listening to old gospel music in Church or listening to country music on our long drives to my grandparents in Ohio, those are all elements that while you don’t know at the time, they are all influencing you.
This was long before I thought about picking up a guitar or writing or song, or even contemplating that someone like me could even do that. When you see the cover of Rolling Stone as a kid, and there’s Robert Plant or someone equally famous and you think “he’s from outer space, people like me, people from my hometown don’t get to do that” So I never had the aspiration, I figured I’d do as my dad did. Put on a suit, go to work, and sell…. something! But that wasn’t in the cards.
Greg: We’re glad you didn’t. Really glad.
Brandon: Well, thank you! As I started to recognize the things that were impacting me in a powerful way, Johnny Cash was a standout. He was just this beautiful walking contradiction of the simplest storytelling but storytelling that could fall on you like a piano off a 10-storey building. The songs just blew me away.
I’m also very much attracted to great singers; Chris Cornell, and Robert Plant, just people that blow me away, and then…when Jeff Buckley was introduced to me, that completely spun me. I’d never heard anything like this, and Jeff was influenced by Chet Baker, who I didn’t know at the time, but who I learned through finding Jeff’s music. That started me down lots of other paths, it’s amazing how music does that.
Greg: Right, it’s all interpolation and influences that spider out and create new knowledge, sounds, and genres. I only just learned of John Prine before his death, but I know a lot of my favorite artists were influenced by him, and just like your Chet Baker story, the artists influenced by Prine led me to his music and the music of his peers.
Clare: It’s really interesting being from opposite sides of the world. There are definitely crossovers in our influences. I love Johnny Cash, I love Jeff Buckley. I wanted to be Springsteen when I grew up, as I told the head of the Opera Company when I was Nine! But there were also other influences that I had and Brandon didn’t, and vice versa of course.
Greg: And you got to open for Springsteen, right?
Clare: We were on the same bill, the same stage, and he’s just a master, it was such an experience.
Greg: It must feel like coming full circle from loving Springsteen to playing the same stage.
Brandon: It was wild. We played the one night and a day later were staring at the stage, watching Springsteen, and not quite believing we were just up there.
Greg: When the crowd is that huge, is it just pure nerves or can you even comprehend the size of the crowd?
Clare: It’s just so much fun. You just go out there and try to be awesome. You can be human though; I mean, I remember even Adele making a mistake when singing a tribute to George Michael and she just felt compelled to stop and start again.
Greg: I remember, I think it was Faster Love.
Clare: Yes, and she just found it too important to start off with a mistake, so she hit it head-on and started again. Thankfully, we didn’t make any mistakes, but we did have the sound desk go down just before our set, meaning we were the only artists to sound check live in front of 60,000 people.
But no, nerves don’t come into it, it’s just so much fun and that doesn’t change whether we are playing small intimate venues like the Bluebird here in Nashville or The Royal Albert Hall, it’s just so much fun we’re so grateful to get to do it. That’s the thing, songs translate well when it’s a guitar and two voices, it works in a coffee shop or an arena, and everything in between.
Greg: Speaking of that your voices sound great on their own but really are something special when mixed. Beautiful, truly.
Clare: Well, thank you!
Greg: I promised we’d get back to Dogs. You’re based in Nashville, how dog-friendly do you find it compared with other cities you’ve encountered?
Clare: It’s pretty great. I think that the Governor just ruled that emotional support animals aren’t permitted in restaurants, but apart from that, dogs are welcome in most bars we go to, especially those with indoor-outdoor spaces.
Brandon: Yeah, you can take your dog to most places but like a lot of things a few entitled people can ruin it and make it harder for the rest of us to take our dogs out when we socialize. More broadly, Nashville has a lot of stars that are big into animal advocacy and rescue.
Emmy Lou Harris is so hands-on, for example, literally bringing at-risk shelter dogs into her own home. She has a foundation, hosts money-raising concerts that we’ve participated in a few times, and she’s just a huge animal advocate.
Clare: We’re excited to play or add our name to any event that supports animals. We recently were at a Mars Petcare event which is where we got our cat. All our animals have always been rescued from shelters with the exception of Faolan, who was facing rehoming because he was too much dog for the people who bred him.
He was the pick of the litter, and having rescued Irish Wolfhounds before, we knew what we were getting into. I’ve rescued Wolfhounds growing up and to think they were almost extinct; it makes it even more amazing to have grown up with them my entire life.
Brandon: It really is like Clare’s mother says. It’s a privilege to be around an animal like that. An animal that cares so deeply for you while also being a giant sleeping at your feet. We’ve had Faolan for 8 years now and I still look at him in sheer amazement. He’s just such a special, special animal.
Greg: I’m not sure how tall you are but I bet he’s taller!
Brandon: Oh, he outweighs me….
Claire: He outweighs both of us combined!
Brandon: Right, and he’s at least two feet taller than me with his paws on my shoulders.
https://www.tiktok.com/@bowenyoungofficial/video/7253067407735016746
Greg: Just some completely unsolicited advice but speaking of large adult dogs, there are some really good supplements available that address some of the pain and aging issues that affect large breeds specifically. What humans have done to dogs through selective breeding is crazy.
Older dogs seem to get sicker more quickly than smaller dogs, but there are all kinds of help for joint pain and nutrition. CBD is a great product that we’ve used on our girls, who are all over 10 now, and it really seems to help.
Clare: That’s good to know, we’ll check that out. He’s incredibly healthy right now, we haven’t seen any indications of signs of pain, but we do try and help him out where we can. We’re putting carpet on our stairs for him.
He just gets so excited that his feet slip out from underneath him, and we’ll do anything to help him have as easy a time as possible.
Greg: That’s really cool that you’re doing that, I’ve never thought of it, but dogs definitely have a better time when not on a hard surface.
Thanks for sharing all you have, I think our readers will love reading about your musical journal, your animal advocacy and especially our conversation around mental health.
Like what Clare’s mom says about it being a true privilege to be around such magnificent animals, I think dogs are the most mindful creatures and can teach us a lot about happiness.
Clare: They’re walking empathy, too, they’re beautiful.
Greg: My last couple of questions are logistical, how do you balance life as animal lovers and touring musicians? You have the Nashville Tour, a show in the UK at the Royal Albert Hall too? Exciting stuff to say the least!
Brandon: It is exciting. The Ryman is my number one favorite room to play in the world, but a close second is the Royal Albert Hall. We were there with the Nashville tour in 2017, I believe, it’s insanely beautiful and special in so many ways.
Clare: As for the logistics, Irish Wolf Hounds especially have terrible separation anxiety, so we go out of our way to ensure that, along with the other animals, he’s in the house with someone who knows and loves him, and who he knows and loves. We’ll never have someone just pop in.
Many times, if someone he knows can’t stay at the house, we’ll drive 12 hours to Brandon’s sister’s place in Florida so he can get that attention from someone he loves. It’s totally worth it, and we keep all the animals, the cats the sugar gliders together, too.
Brandon: But, when possible, we want him to stay at home because well, it’s his home!
Greg: It’s so difficult to leave them though. I travel a lot and it just gives you that lump in your throat to leave.
Brandon: Oh, when we go on tour, and the suitcases come out, the animals know what it is and they don’t like it at all. That’s why for us it’s important for them to be in their home whenever possible, but when it’s not, a 12-hour drive to Florida it is.
Clare: They’re family, I mean our last wolfhound saved my life. He got in between me and some guy that was trying to hurt me. He didn’t have to do much to make the guy leave either, just showed his teeth, and made a noise like something out of Lord of the Rings, and he ran away! They’re remarkable creatures and having grown up with them is a privilege.
View this post on Instagram
Greg: And not to be a downer but that’s why it hurts so hard to see the dogs in shelters like we’ve failed them as humans.
Clare: Absolutely, we’re the ones with thumbs so we must advocate for them. We’re really cut and dry about that, whenever an animal is suffering, or even when it’s not, it’s our job to make their lives as beautiful as possible, they’re just not here long enough. I think it’s that they just get life right a lot quicker than humans, they don’t need all the time we do.
Greg: That’s a beautiful note to end on, because we’re past time, and I’m just so grateful for the time you’ve given me and our readers. I will certainly say hello when I come to do a Nashville issue of the magazine. Thanks, both of you!
Brandon: We’ve enjoyed it, Greg, and you should look up Emmylou Harris’ team because I think the work that she does would be a great story for your publication.
Clare: Yes, thanks, we had fun!
About the band
With haunting and ethereal songs that masterfully delve into the depths of ferocious love, heartbreaking loss, and steadfast hope, the debut album, "Us," by new duo Bowen Young unveils a unique style of music the couple has dubbed “Cinematic Americana.” Bowen Young’s timeless debut record created by Clare Bowen and husband Brandon Robert Young is a multi-sensory feast.
The music, produced by Sean McConnell, invokes themes painted by the duo’s powerfully authentic lyrics and hypnotic harmonies. Clare, the charismatic actress who played Scarlett O’Connor in the popular show "Nashville," is known as a ray of sunshine around the world. Brandon, who began singing at age five under the gentle guidance of his mother, had a very different upbringing and path to Nashville.
It was serendipity that brought Bowen Young together in 2013 when Brandon was a last-minute replacement for Clare’s no-show duet partner for her first solo set at Nashville’s Bridgestone Arena. They immediately discovered they had wonderful chemistry both onstage and off. Brandon proposed to Clare at the Ryman Auditorium during the couple’s Grand Ole Opry set in 2015. They were married by John Carter Cash at the Cash Cabin in 2017.
Learn More
Bowen Young Website: Official Website of Bowen Young
Spotify Link : BOWEN * YOUNG Complete - playlist by BOWEN * YOUNG | Spotify
Apple Music Link: BOWEN YOUNG - Apple Music
Emmylou Harris’ Rescue Organization: Bonaparte's Retreat | ABOUT (bonapartesretreat.org)
