Corb Lund is a Western and country singer/songwriter from Alberta, Canada. He has released nine albums, three of which are certified gold. Lund tours regularly in Canada, the United States and Australia, and has received several awards in Canada and abroad. Lund’s songs feature a gallery of subjects drawn from real life. He says, “A lot of my ancestors pop into the songs. I’ve got quite a cast of characters to draw from. I feel a real kinship with the old West.
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Corb Lund is a Western and country singer/songwriter from Alberta, Canada. He has released nine albums, three of which are certified gold. Lund tours regularly in Canada, the United States and Australia, and has received several awards in Canada and abroad. Lund’s songs feature a gallery of subjects drawn from real life. He says, “A lot of my ancestors pop into the songs. I’ve got quite a cast of characters to draw from. I feel a real kinship with the old West. A lot of my ancestors were ranchers, but one of my great-grandpas was a road gambler in Montana in the 1880s. I’ve got some miners in there. My grandpas in particular were full of lore – they had lots of stories.” Lund’s great-grandfather may be the model for the hard-luck gambler of “A Game in Town Like This.” His own rodeo experience animates “Steer Rider’s Blues.” And Lund’s father, a veterinarian, likely served as the inspiration of “Horse Doctor, Come Quick” and “Talkin’ Veterinarian Blues.” Some characters, like the deadly female gunslinger of “Devil’s Best Dress,” hail from Western folklore, while others – the busted-out rancher of “Long Gone to Saskatchewan,” the farmer displaced by oil drillers in “This is My Prairie” – spin stories torn from the daily papers. These vivid depictions of the Canadian West are never less than universal. Lund notes, “My gut feeling at the beginning, which I think has been borne out, is if you write about what is familiar to you and do a good job of it, the specifics fade away and the universality of the message comes through. When I was younger, listening to Springsteen singing about the slums of New Jersey, that was alien to me, but I got it, because the music is so good. That’s what I aspire to – to paint a picture that’s intriguing.” Unlike many so-called “country artists” these days, he is no drugstore cowboy – he’s the real McCoy. “My family is all ranchers and rodeo people,” Lund says. “They’ve been in Canada for about 100 years, and before that they were raising cattle in Utah and Nevada. Some of my relatives are still down there. I grew up rodeoing. (I was a steer rider) – that’s like the junior version of bull riding. I was on horseback pretty much as soon as I could walk.” Lund’s interest in musical storytelling was bred by his boyhood love of Marty Robbins (whose classic 1959 LP Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs was a crucial discovery) and Johnny Horton (whose hits like “The Battle of New Orleans” and “North to Alaska” impressed the budding history buff). Lund acknowledges the impact of other performers – Kris Kristofferson (now a New West label mate), Ramblin’ Jack Elliott. But some even more important influences ran in the family. “My grandpas used to sing all these old Western cowboy ballads,” Lund says. “Those songs come from before recorded music -- they’re traditional numbers that the cowboys always sing in camp, or just for fun, to entertain themselves. My grandpas knew all those songs. The first song I ever knew was called ‘The Strawberry Roan,’ (a cowboy song that’s at least 150 years old).”
