This Denver Country Artist Is Already Reaching International Audiences

Rhett Haney is used to life on the road. The Denver country artist has been taking his tunes far and wide, but he and his bandmates most often find themselves in Jackson, Wyoming, playing the famed Million Dollar Cowboy Bar. It suits the band's Wild West sound, which weaves outlaw twangs into the genre's traditional sonics, as you can hear on the band's latest release, The Nashville Eight.

The album has been a hit since it dropped in late spring, with such songs as "Turn This Truck Around" and "Acting My Wage" garnering a swell of streams. Haney's vocals, which bring life to blue-collar lyrics spun by songwriters in Nashville, are the main star of the album, reminiscent of Johnny Cash.
The bass guitarist and vocalist moved to Denver with his family when he was thirteen years old, and started his first band six years later. It was called Subliminal Rhythms, taking inspiration from the near-constant tunes in his head. "It was a thing that my girlfriend at the time had realized: Even when I'm asleep, I kind of tap my foot as if there's music playing to a subliminal rhythm that I have built in," he explains.

While that act was short-lived, in 1998 Haney was able to join Tequila Mockingbird, the band fronted by Wendy Clark that had formed two years prior (it's now known as the Wendy Clark Band). "I played with Tequila Mockingbird for twelve-and-a-half years," he says. "We put together the last album we did [2010's Luck and Trouble], which took us two years and a ton of money. It turned out really well — I engineered, recorded and mixed it myself with the help of a producer from Boulder. But I think it wore on us so much that when we released the CD and we did the CD-release party, the band basically self-destructed."

He would still perform with Clark every now and then, "just to have fun," he says, but Haney was on the lookout for a more permanent gig. His friend Matt Buckstein happened to be starting a band after a stint on season six of American Idol. "I auditioned and I got that gig, and that's when I started realizing that I could actually make some money doing this," Haney recalls. "I had always been a metal head, but it was right around that time I realized I really liked this country stuff.

"You hear a lot of rockers and metal guys say, 'Country music is so easy to play,' and that's so BS," he adds. "It's some of the most difficult music I've ever learned, because you really have to know when to shut up."

For more than seven years, he was a drummer for the band Buckstein, which he says "really took off there for a few years." Then, around 2014, he joined longtime country outfit the Walker Williams Band. "He's got his claim to fame because he's the one who recorded the Tree Farm song," Haney says of Walker William. "While I was in his band, playing drums with him in 2019, we were up in Jackson at the Million Dollar Cowboy Bar, and Toby Keith just showed up out of the crowd and got on stage with us. It was pretty shocking."

Haney says he didn't recognize the country superstar — Keith was dressed in golf clothes — until he came up to sing his 1993 hit "Should've Been a Cowboy." "Walker didn't recognize him," he recalls, "and finally he leaned over to him and said, 'Hey, do you like this song?' and finally Walker looked up and was like, 'Oh, you're Toby Keith!' He finished the last chorus with us."

Keith then asked if he could play a couple more songs with the group, and the members happily obliged, performing "Working Man Blues" and "The Chair." By the time the band was finishing the set, word had spread throughout Jackson that Toby Keith was at the Million Dollar Cowboy Bar, and the place was packed. "There's no green room or anything there, so he thanked us and got off the stage and boogied because he was about to get mobbed," Haney remembers. "When we were done with our set, I ran out to try to find him so I could meet him and shake his hand, but he was already gone."

But the memory of meeting the singer, who passed away last year, is enough for Haney: It marked yet another magical night at the Cowboy Bar. When he was playing in Buckstein and the Walker Williams Band, Haney got exposed to even more country stars. "We got to warm up for quite a few national acts," he says, listing Casey Donahew and the Charlie Daniels Band, among others.
By the time the pandemic hit, Haney figured that Williams would be thinking about retiring sooner than later. "Apparently, I was wrong," he notes with a chuckle, since Williams is still playing well into his sixties. "I thought he was done with music. He didn't."

Haney, though, decided to return to the bass and helm his own project in which he would be lead vocalist, something he'd never done before. He formed his self-titled band with members Brett Walston on lead guitar and backing vocals and Matt Feldman on drums as well as backup vocals. Fiddle player Laura Quam will occasionally join in on the fun, too. "I got lightning in a bottle right now because everybody that I work with, we get along great," he says. "We never have any issues."

Being a band leader has been a "learning curve, but I think I've been making the right decisions and getting us going in the right direction," he says. Part of that direction involves getting "original content out there."

The country genre is "a weird animal" in that way, Haney says. All the songs on The Nashville Eight were written by Nashville songwriters. "The producer, Trafton Harvey, reached out to me and said, 'I like your voice, let's see if you like any of these songs and we'll put them together,'" he recalls, adding that's standard for the genre. "George Strait, for instance, he's got probably seventy number-one hits now and he's had his hand in writing about three of 'em. He's another, 'Use my voice, give me good songs' kind of thing."

For The Nashville Eight, Haney was sent demos of songs he could use for the album; he was pulled to different ones for different reasons."This Old Barstool" appealed to his metalhead sensibilities — "It had this edge to it," he says — while "That Makes Two of Us" stood out for its narrative lyrics.

But now Haney's putting pen to paper more often. "I want to be more involved," he says, "not only for royalty purposes, but also because I can say it's mine."

While Nashville may seem like the natural next step for Rhett Haney, the frontman assures us that his band isn't going anywhere anytime soon. "I've had quite a few friends move to Nashville and come back with their tail between their legs because it's tough out there. We don't know how good we have it here, really," he says. "We actually get paid to play here — we get a guarantee to play music here. And in Nashville, you're not guaranteed anything. In Nashville, you're just playing for tips. Now granted, people tip really well."

Since the pandemic ended, the band's been gigging it up and has established a large following across the West and beyond. When Haney checks his stats on the streaming platform, they'll show listeners tuning in from Sweden, Germany and even Australia. At a gig at the Cowboy Bar, he was approached by a woman who flew across continents for the show.

"She was like, 'I'm from South Africa, and this is my daughter, Cheyenne,'" he recalls. "On one of my cover albums, I covered a George Strait song called 'I Can Still Make Cheyenne." And she's like, 'We really love your version of that, and so we decided to come watch you sing it.' I was like, 'Well, thanks.' And she's like, 'Yeah, we live in Dubai now, but we made my husband fly us out here from Dubai to watch it.'

"I'm like, 'You came all the way from Dubai to watch me sing that song?'" Haney recalls, still stunned.

"Little things like that happen all the time," he says. "And that's my goal, just to get the album and the new stuff in front of people who haven't heard it. And that's all you can do. ... It's just all hard work and talent. If you have both, then you should be able to make that dream come true."

The Nashville Eight is available to stream on all platforms. Find tour dates at rhetthaney.com.