The Brewer Boys: From Covering Rihanna on a 2011 "X Factor" to Building a Career

Greeted with stifled yawns from Paula Abdul and Pharrell, the teens-at-the-time feature the naturally-beautiful harmonies of classic brothers and others like The Everlys and Simon & Garfunkel.

The Brewer Boys are Justin (l), and Nathan, a duo of Filipino-American brothers from Temecula, California, which is part of the Greater Los Angeles area. It’s approximately 58 miles north of downtown San Diego, and 85 miles southeast of downtown L.A.

Since the turn-of-the century debut of FOX’s American Idol, I had become hooked on not only the pick-your-fave voting nature of the show, but on hearing new voices you’d hear nowhere else! It didn’t matter that the music wasn’t new (these were all covers being performed, after all)…it’s clear that there is an amazing amount of prodigious talent lurking in the bedrooms of small-town and big-city America!

The birth, proliferation, and the ratings-race of copy-cat talent competitions was on…to varying degrees of network success and the uncovering of new, gifted talents. At some point, was it a foregone conclusion that the talent field would be inherently and inevitably thinned?

Cut to Simon Cowell’s The X Factor, his UK replacement for that country’s Pop Idol (2001-2003), the precursor to the States’ American Idol iteration. The X Factor, then, was “farmed out” to other countries, including the U.S. from 2011-2013, as The X Factor USA, also airing on FOX.

I was watching in 2011, when The Brewer Boys (Justin was 17, and Nathan, 14) made their appearance on X Factor USA before show judges Paula Abdul (who had put in time “judging” on American Idol a few years earlier) and fellow hitmaker, Pharrell Williams, at a Santa Barbara mansion’s backyard. The image here is flipped, presumably to skirt YouTube copyright issues:

RiRi Lays the Foundation