Brudi Brothers take over UD
The Brudi Brothers didn’t so much take the stage at Mallapalooza Saturday night as detonate it. One minute, the University of Dallas campus was a laid-back spring festival, and the next, it was a full-blown, boots-kicking, beer-sloshing, bodies-everywhere riot of sound and motion.
From the first sloppy, grinning chord Johannes Brudi hammered out of his battered Martin guitar, it was clear this wasn’t going to be a careful, polite college gig. This was a runaway freight train of outlaw folk energy—wild, sweaty and hell-bent on taking the crowd with it.
The three brothers—Johannes, Conrad and George—crashed through the night with the kind of loose, joyful abandon you can’t fake. Every stomp of a boot, every scrape of fiddle against string, every gut-punch chorus rang out with the same unspoken message: “We’re here to tear this place up, and you’re coming with us.”
And the UD crowd? They couldn’t get enough. By the end of the first song, kids were hoisted on shoulders, cups were flying and the Mall looked less like a campus quad and more like a scene from some lost honky-tonk fever dream.
The Brudis opened with their tongue-in-cheek viral smash, “Me More Cowboy Than You,” and the place exploded. It’s the kind of song tailor-made for drunken yelling and gleeful self-mockery—a rowdy stomp of a tune where every audience member suddenly thinks they’ve spent their whole lives roping cattle somewhere in Montana.
“Y’all ready to get a little stupid?” Johannes hollered into the mic, the brim of his sweat-stained hat low over his eyes, and the roar that came back would have rattled the stained-glass windows of the UD chapel.
Stylistically, the Brudi Brothers drift somewhere between the ramshackle charm of Old Crow Medicine Show and the barroom storytelling grit of early Waylon Jennings. What they lack in polish, they make up for tenfold in raw heart and chemistry. Their harmonies—thick, rough and joyful—wrapped themselves around each song like a worn leather strap.
On tracks like “Road Dust Waltz” and “Amsterdam Blues,” they showed off a softer side, swapping out pounding rhythms for slow-burn melodies full of longing and backroad nostalgia. During “Amsterdam Blues,” the whole Mall swayed in a giant, drunken hug, cellphones lit up like fireflies.
Conrad Brudi took center stage halfway through, tearing into a fiddle solo on “Devil’s in the Hayloft” that somehow managed to sound both devilish and impossibly sweet at the same time. George, meanwhile, stood grinning behind his upright bass, thumping out a heartbeat that never once wavered, no matter how hard the songs careened around him.
Between songs, the Brudi Brothers barely slowed down, charging straight from one sweaty anthem into the next with the reckless confidence of a band that knows the night is theirs. Conrad would rip a shrieking bow across his fiddle, Johannes would kickstart another dirty guitar riff and George, steady as a steam engine, would drive the whole thing forward with a pounding bass line. There were no careful set changes, no polite breathers—just one ragged cheer bleeding straight into the next, the brothers grinning like outlaws on the run.
There were moments of surprising tenderness, too. The brothers pulled the energy way down for “See You Soon,” a bittersweet ballad written during lockdown. For four minutes, the wild party froze. Friends leaned into each other. Couples slow-danced in the grass. It was a rare, beautiful silence.
But that mood didn’t last long. Almost as soon as the last mournful note drifted off, the Brudis slammed into “Galloping Ghost”—a sweaty, galloping folk-rock riot that had the whole Mall howling and stomping so hard you could feel it in your teeth.
They closed the night with “Whiskey River Revival,” a raucous, half-drunk pile-up of guitar, fiddle and straightforward lyrics, the brothers practically shouting over each other and the crowd shouting right back. When they finally crashed through the last chorus, the Mall was a mess of exhausted, ecstatic college kids still singing, still reaching for one more note.
The Brudi Brothers didn’t just play a show at Mallapalooza. They threw a party that the University of Dallas is going to be talking about for a long, long time. We hope to see them again next year!