As I write this, the Milwaukee Brewers have just won the National League Pennant and are headed to the World Series. Go ahead, drink it in; I’ll wait. With luck, and maybe a little divine intervention (are you there, Ueck? It’s me, Susan), you’re reading this while basking in the afterglow of The Crew’s first championship. This is a record review, and they’re supposed to be au currant, bringing news of new sounds, but I’ve got my head and heart in The Game. Therefore, I humbly submit to you my favorite record of the moment, Nate Gibson’s Fear the Beer: A Musical Salute to the Milwaukee Brewers.
The year was 2025 and the Brewers were pure fire when Gibson—UW-Madison folklorist, baseball fanatic, musician, and scholar of country music—sought to fill a Barrelman-shaped hole in the genre of Baseball Songs. He proceeded to write and record an album of classic-country mash notes to the team in the space of a few weeks, sliding in just in time for the ‘25 playoffs. I assure you, it’s aged beautifully.
Fear The Beer opens fittingly on the bluegrassy title track, Randy Finley’s fiddle kicks and delivers the rallying cry of the chorus, built around delightfully tortured rhyming verse, and hey—you try to come up with 3 ½ minutes of lines to rhyme with “Brewers!” (Notably, our 7th-inning-stretch polka--included on this record as an instrumental--features the line “zing boom tarrarel,” so until someone can tell me what a tarrarel is, I figure Nate’s continuing a great Wisconsin tradition.) From that leadoff, Gibson takes us on history lessons in “Four Long Years,” recounting the drought after the departure of the Braves, and the Bob Wills-style swing of “This Bud’s For You,” about the Bud who brought baseball back to Milwaukee and left his mark on the entire sport as commissioner. There’s a rollicking rockabilly belly-scritch to Hank The Dog (“the cutest little unofficial mascot baseball has ever seen”), and a sweet elegy to Bob Uecker (“Get Up, Get Up, Get Outta Here [And Gone]”) delivered with winking reverence worthy of Mr. Baseball. I’m not cryin’, you’re cryin’.
Given that Dr. Nate Gibson is, at his core, a lover of country music’s storytelling, he pays due respect to the intersection of genre and sport. “The Jackie Robinson of Country Music” details the story of Charlie Pride, whose career-ending injury to his pitching arm was country music’s gain. And our Triple-A team? The Nashville Sounds, built by the likes of Conway Twitty, L. E. White, and Jerry Reed, recounted in the shuffle “Down On The Farm In Nashville.” And do not miss the sendup of the George Jones classic in “The Sausage Race Is On,” citing its source material with a hilarious legal disclaimer.
Of course a record celebrating this history-making team wouldn’t be complete without recognizing some of our legends in progress. The Texas Tornadoes-inflected “Yeli, The Kid, and The Miz” highlights the 2025 season and its stars in glorious detail, right down to Murph’s pocket pancakes and free George Webb burgers! Even the repeated namechecks of Freddy Peralta (now Tampa Bay’s ace pitcher) don’t make me bristle, and I honestly hope Jake Bauers doesn’t cause undue pain as he grinds Peralta down with every at-bat. “King Vaughn’s Crown and Johnny’s Ghost” is another intersecting song, celebrating 1B Andrew Vaughn’s inspired choice of walk-up songs, Cash’s version of “God’s Gonna Cut You Down.” Finally, a track I dared not air until now, “The Road to the World Series” is a flat-out truckin’ song that would make Dave Dudley proud, reminding us that even the best gig in the universe involves a lot of work.
Fear the Beer: A Musical Salute to the Milwaukee Brewers is a scrappy, “small-ball” record; it doesn’t strut or swing for the fences, but gets the job done one track at a time, and gets under your skin like another Jake Bauers foul. It’s deeply aware that baseball, like country music, is built by and for heartbreak. And it keeps a goofy looseness that comes from being both exceedingly skilled, and a little awestruck at having pulled the whole thing off at all. Sound familiar?
You can find Fear the Beer on CD and digital download at https://nategibson.bandcamp.com/album/fear-the-beer-a-musical-salute-to-the-milwaukee-brewers where a portion of the profits benefit the Wisconsin Humane Society in memory of Hank the Dog.
