Brave Combo on World Cafe
Setlist
Apr
07
Brave Combo
World Cafe
  • Brave Combo, "Do Something Different"
  • Lawrence Welk, "Beer Barrel Polka"
  • André Popp, "Java"
  • Brave Combo, "Vuela La Paloma"
  • Brave Combo, "The Chicken Dance"
  • Brave Combo, "No, No, No, Cha, Cha, Cha"
  • Brave Combo, "In Heaven, There Is No Beer"
  • Brave Combo, "Do Something Different"

Polka music has taken Brave Combo from Denton, Texas — the latest stop in our Sense of Place series — to some wild places: from Japan to being featured in an episode of The Simpsons to playing at David Byrne‘s wedding.

But the band doesn’t play traditional polka — founder Carl Finch decided early on he wanted to play polka hard and fast… and different.

“I thought, ‘Screw everybody. Let’s play this like a rock band and see what happens’ — because the music was worth it.”

Brave Combo is a band that does things their own way, which is something Carl partly credits to that fierce independent streak Texas is known for: “It’s just this renegade spirit that I know we’ve drawn from. By nature and by design, we want to not be like anything else. There’s a strong drive to always be different.”