Ricochet is a great band that I really like. They were founded in 1993 by brothers Jeff Bryant (drums & vocals) and Junior Bryant (fiddle, mandolin, vocals), along with Greg Cook (bass guitar), Teddy Carr (steel guitar, dobro), Eddie Kilgallon (keyboards, rhythm guitar) and Heath Wright (lead vocals,lead guitar).They are all from the state of Oklahoma.

Ricochet was signed to a recording contract with Columbia Records in 1996, and was dropped in 2001. Then they released a live album on an independant label. After some time went by members of Ricochet changed. The only members that were members that remain from before are Greg Cook and Heath Wright alongside with Dwayne Dupuy (vocals, keyboards,trumpet), Kenny Lewis (vocals, guitar), and Troy Nelson (harmony vocals, drums).

Ricochet’s “Feel Like Fallin’ ” written by Luke Bryan and Shane Teeters, is a great song with some amazingly beautiful harmonization at the introduction. In this song he claims to have been “the king of heartaches that wore chains of loneliness on his feet” and has now met someone that rescued him by just their touch. I really like this song and the music to it is really easy to get into.
Here’s what a of couple band members have to say.

Greg: “This is one that we found. We cut this about three years ago, and it’s been in our archive ever since. Eric Silver produced it, and Robert Wright remastered it for this record. It’s a good song, and there’s a lot of lyrical things that are interesting ways of putting things. Basically, it’s got you until it goes into that weird vocal thing and chord progression, then you ear kind of goes, “Whoa, what was that?” We still listen to this now and go, “Wow, that’s a great record.”

Heath: “I was single at the time we cut the song and it just sort of described me. The whole song is chock-full of really cool lines. I thought it was just a great way to describe someone who wouldn’t commit. I think there are a lot of guys who can really relate to that type of lyric, if they can understand the poetry of it. Of course, the women can understand the poetry of it, and probably name five or six guys that fit that bill.”

Now, my favorite song of Ricochet’s is “That’s Love” written by Lonnie Williams, Dave Brainard, Kenny Roister. The lyrics in this one is pretty touchy, and it has great music to go along with that. To summarize this song, the first verse is about a girl who is having a baby, and the father claims he won’t have anything to do with the baby. She goes to an abortion clinic and ends up walking out even though she was going to have to raise a child on her own, “that’s love”. Another verse from the song is talking about and older married couple. The mans wife is in the hospital and doesn’t even remember her husband, and he knows that, but doesn’t keep him from going to visit her. He states that he’ll be there until her final breath because vows aren’t meant to be broken, “that’s love”. The chorus telling one of many definitions of love. It’s “when you sacrifice for someone else, you put them before yourself, you don’t think about what your giving up, “that’s love”. Of course my favorite verse is the last one. Though by this point you get the hint of what their reference is about love, I didn’t see this line coming. “God’s only son, hanging from the cross, he died for all of us, “THAT’S LOVE”.

Heath: “We had some disagreements with our management at the time we first did this song. It’s a real emotional song, and a very spiritual song. This was before it was cool to record spiritual songs. It was kind of taking a chance for us in our career, whether or not anybody would want this song. We were shopping for a major-label deal at the time. We’d fallen in love with the song and were doing it in our show. We’d seen the effect it had on people. It was a No. 1 Christian Country song in Power Source magazine for the whole month of April 2005. It was nice to have a No. 1 record on the song, but it’s really cool when people come through the autograph line and say that the song touched them in some way. That’s more of a barometer of success than a No. 1 record.”

A couple of songs you may remember from some years back are “Daddy’s Money”, and “What Do I Know”. Ricochet was recently out on the road throughout the summer in support of “Feel Like Fallin’ ” that had a string of Midwest dates that included a September 5th stop in Oklahoma at the PRCA Rodeo.
Jenna Tanner
CMTT Music Contributor
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