Braxton Keith On How Quickly Doing 150 Shows A Year Makes Your Band Become Family: “It’s Weird Being At The House By Yourself”

Time well spent together is sometimes all it takes to turn friends or coworkers into family.

Braxton Keith stopped by the Whiskey Riff Raff podcast for our final episode of the year (don’t worry, we’ll be back in 2026). The young country star talked about how he avoids burnout with a busy touring schedule, his recent cover of George Strait’s “The Chair” (and when fans can expect a live version to drop), and that he actually comes from a family of dentists.

Obviously, he veered off his family’s path and has become one of the shining examples of neotraditional country music. Braxton Keith is helping to keep that sound alive, and spoke on how important it is for real, genuine music to exist with the surge of AI in music as of late, and even touched on how often he’s asked if he’s related to Toby Keith.

But one of the big talking points during our conversation with Braxton was the grind that he’s been on in the past couple of years that has helped him get to where he is today. Keith says he’s worked hard to have a bit of a work-life balance, but when he was really getting started, he and his band didn’t have a lot of spare time:

“All you’ve got to do is put in a lot of hard work and have a little luck. It’s really just been nose-down grinding. We’ve been playing 150 shows (every year) for the last three years at least now. We’ve just been grinding every weekend. There is no off weekend. There was nothing other than music.”

And 150 shows is a lot when you factor in that venues can sometimes be hundreds of miles apart, which calls for travel days (and nights) and not a lot of downtime. Keith says they’ll stay out weeks at a time going from show to show, and that kind of life is only for the strong willed artists and musicians.

Of course, he also conceded that making it big looks a little different now than it did back in the day:

“Now, the winds have blown in and changed the course (of how to do things) again. I think I got into it at the very beginning of this social media empire for music, but it’s mainly switched to that now. Hard work is less about playing shows and more about capturing moments for other people to connect with online.”

@whiskeyriff @Braxton Keith #whiskeyriff #whiskeyriffraff ♬ Cozy – Braxton Keith

That change can generally be viewed as a bad thing, but Braxton Keith still believes that now is the golden age of music, and that country music has never been more alive.

And he’s lucky to have a band full of people that feel the same way. Braxton spoke highly of the guys he travels and plays with, and said that they’ve spent so much time together in the past couple of years that they are all one big family now:

“The band is basically family now. We spend so much time together, they’re family. I don’t know what I’d do without those boys. We get bored when we’re not on the road with each other. When we’re at the house, we’re always calling each other or seeing what everyone’s doing. We’re so used to everybody being there. It’s weird going from being with 14 or 15 guys to being at the house by yourself.”

So what do Braxton Keith and the rest of the crew do to pass the time out on the road?

They are still trying to lock down a collective hobby they can all enjoy. There for a while, they were tearing up any bowling alley they could find. More recently, they’ve ventured into the frustrating sport of golf, which has brought about some financial and logistical issues:

“The boys like to golf a lot. We used to be heavily into bowling. Now everybody’s kind of getting into golf. The reason we didn’t want to get into golf is because it’s expensive. Everybody’s gotta get clubs, then everybody has bags, then everybody has to carry their clubs with them. We ran into that same issue with bowling, because everyone had to have more than one ball.”

Hilarious that, even when they were bowling, everyone felt the need to buy and travel with their own bowling ball.

But it’s cool to know that Braxton Keith and his band are such a tight-knit group, and enjoy each other’s company so much that they’ll check in even when they aren’t together. And you can hear more about all of that from Braxton Keith by downloading the podcast on Apple Podcasts. Just search “Whiskey Riff Raff” or click here.

We’re also available on Spotify and wherever else you can listen to podcasts.

Cheers, y’all.

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