There was once a time when I felt like I was one of the only Ontario-born Ontarians who was a Corb Lund fan. That was more than 20 years ago, when I’d see the songwriter and his band of “Hurtin’ Albertans” play to no more than a couple dozen people at the Raintree Café in Waterloo or the Tranzac in Toronto. This week he’s playing the 1,500-cap Danforth Music Hall.
Back then he was touring 2002’s Five Dollar Bill, one of my favourite all-time country records — or rather, western records, as the ranch-raised, jazz-trained Corb will happily get into the etymology of how and why country and western are incorrectly marketed as the same genre of music. Corb Lund is also the kind of wordsmith who might use “etymology” in one of his rhyming couplets.
Corb Lund, who started out as the bass player in the indefinable ’90s metal/prog band the Smalls, is also the kind of guy who is happy to rave about Voivod or Leslie Feist’s teenage grunge band, as he does in the interview below, conducted for Hearts On Fire.
Speaking of which, I was pleasantly surprised to hear Terry David Mulligan (!) name-drop my book in this recent interview with Corb, where you can also hear the singer rant eloquently (of course) about his current pet peeve: a coal-mining project in his backyard that threatens local water supplies during a drought.
Corb Lund is a long-hauler. There has never been a lightning-bolt moment that’s vaulted the Albertan songwriter to the next stage of his career either here or around the world, not even signing to big American indie New West in 2009, where he remains. (Australia was once a big market for him; he’s on an extensive European tour this spring. The U.S. continues to grow, particularly in Texas and the Midwest.)
It’s been one very long, very slow build — a few fans at a time. Usually at a live show, although among his 10 solid studio albums of original material, at least three are, to me, all-time classics (Five Dollar Bill, 2007’s Horse Soldier, 2012’s Cabin Fever). Start there and dive into the rest: he never disappoints.
His new one, El Viejo, might well join that best-of list: it’s an all-acoustic set of new originals recorded live in his living room, though it sounds so good you’d never know that. There are, as usual, more than a few songs about playing cards. (Geoff Berner once wrote a song about his friend called “Don’t Play Cards for Money with Corby Lund.” Lund in turn has covered Berner’s “That’s What Keeps the Rent Down.”) The melodies harken back to the Spanish influences of his earliest solo work. During pandemic lockdowns he took guitar lessons for the first time in years, this time from Megadeth’s guitarist. There’s a sobering song called “Redneck Rehab.” And the title track is a tip of the Stetson to Corb’s long-time pal and mentor, the late Ian Tyson:
Didn’t think you’d see Megadeth and Ian Tyson in the same paragraph, did you? You will when you write about Corb Lund, who is also one of the few western songwriters I can imagine, other than maybe Steve Earle, who would write a song titled “Insah’Allah”:
Along with the TDM chat linked above, there’s a good recent interview in the Winnipeg Free Press by Alan Small (no relation to the Smalls).
Corb Lund and his band are playing Bridgeworks in Hamilton tonight, Toronto on Wednesday at Danforth Music Hall.
Full interview for paid subscribers is below:
Corb Lund
Feb 18 2020
Phone from his Alberta home
I went down a Smalls wormhole recently. I feel like a shithead Easterner for never fully grasping the Smalls.
(laughs) You’re not alone.
You’ve talked about seeing things on MuchMusic that turned you on to rock’n’roll. Do you remember specifics?
I do. It wasn’t MuchMusic so much as it was [specifically] The New Music. When I was in high school, me and Mike from the Smalls were obsessed with SCTV. We had a tongue-in-cheek punk band in Taber, writing original songs. It was a parody of the Sex Pistols, like this SCTV skit called the Queen Haters. We weren’t hip to new punk. We were doing it as a joke, with some covers and originals.
SCTV was on TV every day at 11pm, and at 11.30 The New Music was on. We weren’t particularly glued to the set waiting for it, but we’d watch it anyway because we watched SCTV religiously. I think they only had six or eight episodes that they played over and over.
Weird. That show ran for so many years, so maybe only a few episodes were syndicated to that Alberta station?
Yeah, I don’t know, but the same episodes kept coming up. There was a punk one. And one about the Winnipeg speed metal scene. They had all these bands with lots of x’s and y’s in their name. The New Music was our only little window. That and going to the weird rock shop in Calgary every six months and see gig posters, or go into shops and see [records by] indie bands we’d never heard of. That was our only exposure to non-mainstream music. We were into Sabbath and Zeppelin. I could sense there was another world out there.
Keep in mind: I’m from three hours south of Calgary and my family are all cowboys, so I have no exposure to this stuff. I found it all exotic. There are people who find Western cowboy stuff exotic, but I grew up with it. My family’s done that for generations. I was intrigued by the vibrancy of the indie scene since my late teens. When [Smalls singer] Mike [Caldwel] and I went to Edmonton to the jazz program at MacEwan College…
So it was specifically jazz? Or is that just the name of the music program?
We didn’t like jazz at all, but they didn’t have an Iron Maiden school, so there we were.
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