The Red Clay Strays never set out to captivate country music. Even though they accidentally became Nashville’s latest heroes, that’s still the case.
“We’re country boys,” Brandon Coleman tells me. “We were all raised in the South, and we were all raised on country music. But we just make whatever noise we make when we make our art, and it’s too exhausting to try to stick to a genre.”
The Strays’ frontman is seated at a table with his bandmates at Green Valley Ranch, a swanky casino-resort in the Las Vegas suburb of Henderson. There’s gambling there, of course, and a bar around every corner, but it’s isolated from the overt decadence and chaos of the Strip, 15 miles away.
Coleman, the band’s chiseled-from-marble lead singer, and his bandmates in the Strays are midway through a three-day stretch in Sin City. The six-piece from Mobile, Alabama, are in town to perform “Demons in Your Choir” at the Academy of Country Music Awards at the MGM Grand Garden Arena — while attending as Group of the Year nominees. Their performance of “Demons” will feature a 24-person gospel choir, just like their set at the Stagecoach Music Festival in late April.
“We’re happy to play to anybody that’ll sit there and give us the time of day,” says Zach Rishel, the group’s lead guitar player.
