“Fear The Beer” isn’t just a rallying cry this October. It’s also the opening track of Nate Gibson’s new album, a 12-song country tribute to the Milwaukee Brewers that blends honky-tonk, bluegrass, rockabilly and polka into a full-blown playoff soundtrack.
The Madison-based musician, archivist, and WORT 89.9 FM host spent just four weeks writing and recording Fear The Beer: A Musical Salute To The Milwaukee Brewers. What started as a lark—“maybe one or two songs”—quickly snowballed into a dozen. The result is an album stacked with racing sausages, ballpark lore, and country twang. It’s Gibson’s love letter to the 2025 Brewers, punctuated by his rallying cry: “This is the year of the Brewers!”
The project lands as a postseason charged with “Uecker Magic” is set to begin. This is the first October without Mr. Baseball in the booth, and Brewers fans and players alike are feeling that absence. Gibson is too. “Get Up, Get Up, Get Outta Here (And Gone)” tips a cap to Bob Uecker, the very reason Gibson became a Brewers fan in the first place. A childhood Cardinals fan who later adopted the Red Sox while living in Boston, Gibson never expected to switch allegiances again. But after moving to Wisconsin nearly a decade ago, he fell in love with the Brewers through Ueck’s voice.
“Pretty soon I was like, ‘These Uecker stories and Uecker calls make me just want to listen to the Brewers,’” Gibson says. “‘I don’t want to listen to the Red Sox anymore.’ And that was eight and a half, nine years ago. I’ve been listening to the Brewers at night, all my summer nights since.”
To Gibson, Uecker wasn’t just calling games—he was making them matter. He could make a blowout feel worth sticking around for or a rain delay feel like time well spent.
“He’s a comedian, and it’s rare to have a comedian in the booth, but he’s also a player and he’s also a scout and he’s also incredibly knowledgeable about the game,” Gibson says. “I felt like he was very sincere about his, not relationships with players, but his friendships with players. So to say, ‘Oh, I was talking to Yeli the other day,’ or, ‘I was talking to Jackson, and we were talking about…,’ it just felt like a sincere story. Like you were invited into the living room. I felt like I was a friend. He made you feel like part of the team in a way that I think a lot of other announcers don’t.”
The spark for the project came from somewhere far less obvious though—country music legend Charley Pride. Gibson, a music historian who literally wrote the book on the storied Starday Records (The Starday Story: The House That Country Music Built), is a prolific collector of Starday memorabilia. In the middle of one of his hunts, he came across some non-Starday memorabilia that stopped him cold.
“I found these two postcards of Charley Pride in a Brewers uniform,” Gibson recalled.
That discovery sent him down a rabbit hole. Pride, country music’s first Black superstar, had once chased a baseball career in the Negro Leagues and minors before breaking barriers on the Grand Ole Opry stage. By 1970, Pride was a friend of Brewers Manager Dave Bristol, who named Pride as an honorary member of the team and invited him to three straight spring trainings to swing a bat in Brewers blue.
That unlikely overlap turned into “The Jackie Robinson Of Country Music,” Gibson’s tribute to Pride as a barrier-breaker who managed to straddle two worlds—baseball and country music—where Black pioneers were still the exception.
From there, Gibson—an archivist at UW–Madison’s Mills Music Library, where he helps preserve Wisconsin’s musical past—just kept tugging at the thread of country-music connections to the Milwaukee Brewers. Hank The Dog, the late and beloved ballpark pup, got his own tune tying him to the many Hanks who populate country music history.
“There’s a lot of Hanks that, as a honky-tonk band, we miss,” Gibson croons. “I could think of Hank Thompson, Hank Penny, Hank Garland, Hank Snow, and Hank Williams. Well, in country music, I could name many more, but we could never leave out No. 44—Hammerin’ Hank! But of all those Hanks, there’s only one whose belly I wish that I could still rub!”
There’s a nod to the Brewers’ Triple-A squad, based just down the road from Nashville’s Music Row, in “Down On The Farm in Nashville.” Gibson salutes current players with country walk-up music—Andrew Vaughn steps up to Johnny Cash, while reliever Jared Koenig takes the mound to Cody Jinks, and starter Brandon Woodruff comes out to Luke Bryan—in “King Vaughn’s Crown And Johnny’s Ghost.” And then there’s “The Sausage Race Is On,” which manages to connect a classic George Jones number to Milwaukee’s famous racing links while slipping in a sly wink at the infamous Randall Simon sausage-smacking incident.
For Gibson, the record isn’t just a pile of novelty tracks and baseball trivia. It’s also about finding joy at a time when the world has felt heavier than ever.
“The Brewers are certainly an easy flashpoint for, ‘This is joyful. This is just fun,’” Gibson says. “It’s an escape, but it’s meaningful in that it brings people together to share community over shared joy.”
That sense of joy runs through the project’s scrappy process, too. Unlike his work with Nate Gibson & the Stardazers—his tight, traditional country outfit—Gibson didn’t book weeks of professional studio time for this one. He built this “bedroom project” in living rooms, offices, and bedrooms on a shoestring budget and an accelerated timeline. His nephew, Ethan Gibson, a metal frontman for the band Fahr from Lincoln, Nebraska, mixed and mastered the album and added a guitar solo to “King Vaughn’s Crown and Johnny’s Ghost.” It was the first time Gibson was able to work with his talented nephew, but he said it certainly won’t be the last.
“Everybody I talked to was like, ‘You probably can’t do an album. It’s like three weeks ’til the season’s over,’” Gibson says. “Ethan was the only one who was like, ‘Yeah, let’s do it. I’ll record the vocals. This’ll be fun.’”
As the Brewers charge into the playoffs, Gibson’s songs land exactly as they should: a soundtrack that’s equal parts goofy and heartfelt. They’re a reminder that what fuels both country music and baseball isn’t polish but heart—underdogs, tall tales, and the joy of a cold beer in your hand.
And Gibson’s prediction for October?
“Obviously Brew Crew all the way!”
Fear The Beer is available now on Bandcamp ($10 digital/$12 CD), with all proceeds going to the Wisconsin Humane Society in memory of Hank The Dog.