Corb Lund heads home to embrace well-worn sound

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This article was published 12/03/2024 (543 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Corb Lund goes all-in on his new all-acoustic album, El Viejo.

The Alberta country-and-western singer-songwriter — he tells New West stories with Old West sensibilities — brought together his band, the Hurtin’ Albertans, to his home in Lethbridge to create a record with a relaxed, intimate feel.

“I’ve been wanting to make this acoustic thing for a long time and we did it all live, with hardly any overdubs,” says Lund, 55, who plays the Burton Cummings Theatre Wednesday, with Virginia country group 49 Winchester opening the show.

“I don’t like nice-sounding records any more. I like records with raw, organic scars on them. I like gnarly shit.”

Two Manitobans — guitarist Grant Siemens and bassist Sean Burns — are in the Hurtin’ Albertans; besides producing the record, Siemens added new, yet old, guitars to his repertoire to build on the album’s vintage-sounding songs.

“For a while, he said he didn’t feel (acoustic guitar) was his backyard,” Lund says of Siemens. “He got a hold of this 1930s resonator guitar, made out of metal, and he also got one of those Django Reinhardt minouche (guitars) with nylon strings that they used in France in the 1930s, and between those two instruments he’s really found a voice on acoustic and it’s awesome.”

Burns joined Lund’s band two years ago and he’s become a good fit.

“Sean’s a really ray of sunlight. He’s a fantastic singer and he’s a historian of country music, a fun guy having around in the band,” Lund says.

Lund dedicates El Viejo — it means “the old man” in Spanish — to Ian Tyson, his longtime friend and mentor, who died Dec. 29, 2022, at age 89.

A drawing of an old saddle rests on a black background on the album cover, a nod to Tyson’s love of ranching in the Alberta foothills when he wasn’t on tour.

The cowboy singer hobnobbed with Bob Dylan, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and other folk legends at New York coffee houses in the early ’60s as part of the husband-and-wife duo Ian & Sylvia; it was in the Big Apple, and not on some lonely prairie, where Tyson penned the melancholy folk ballad Four Strong Winds in 1962.

Lund sings a similar lament in the album’s title track, an ode to Tyson: “You know I hate to see you leave / But it ain’t no secret you believed / You was meant for earlier days / Wilder times and a freer range.”

“When I write songs it usually takes months to finish them, because I polish them up each day and it’s a very slow process, but that one came real quick,” Lund says.

Tyson’s presence was missed more than ever at the Lone Star Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Alpine, Texas, in February. It was a regular Tyson haunt; Lund is calling from the event, prior to checking out Elliott’s gig and preparing for his own set.

Gambling is also on Lund’s mind on El Viejo, whether he’s griping about Tyson’s favourite blackjack tables in Nevada’s dusty country casinos being squeezed out by garish slot machines, or the slow demise of poker tables in gambling halls.

He says his great-grandfather was a card sharp in Montana in the 1890s, so perhaps Lund’s love of cards has been passed down from one generation to the next.

“My mom still denies it, but my grandpa told about it and my friend is a Montana historian and found his name in a police blotter, so I guess it’s true,” he says.

Poker is synonymous with the Old West — Wild Bill Hickok was slain in a famous poker game in a Deadwood, S.D., saloon, holding the “dead man’s hand,” black aces and eights — and Lund touches upon his favourite card game in several songs, most notably on When the Game Gets Hot.

Lund co-wrote the track with Brian Koppelman, whose screenplays for the films Rounders and Ocean’s Thirteen are gambling-related; he is also one of the executive producers of the Showtime series Billions.

The two crossed paths when Lund appeared on the podcast The Moment with Brian Koppelman to chat about his 2020 album, Agricultural Tragic, and found they both had a love of full houses and royal flushes.

“He had this idea and I fleshed it out with him and it was really good,” Lund says.

It’s can be difficult to imagine Winnipeg being part of the Old West, but the Burt, which opened in 1907 and surely showed a few westerns with poker scenes when it was a movie house, might be one of the city’s last connections to a bygone era.

Its history makes it one of Lund’s favourite places to play.

“I love how worn-in and historical it is. This isn’t a negative comment, but I like how it’s not run-down but it’s well-worn,” he says.

“I like my guitars well-worn and my jeans well-worn and my people well-worn.”

Alan.Small@winnipegfreepress.com

X: @AlanDSmall