A couple of wolves trotted out in front of Corb Lund the other night. The scene would seem perfect for the Western culture figure: a snowy Alberta midnight, the witness being a neo-iconic troubadour we usually see in a cowboy hat, often with a kerchief around his neck, singing songs harvested from his lifelong connections to cattle, horses, grain, hay, tractors, fields and mountains.
But this, he told The Citizen, was not out at his log cabin in the hills by the Pembina River. It was not on the family homestead more than 100 years old. It was right inside the urban features of Edmonton.
The wolves might have thought the same, looking at Lund. They might have marveled at this Canadian cultural conundrum. He was raised ultra-rural on Wilf Carter and Ian Tyson, but grabbed onto Black Sabbath as a youth and arched off into punk rock with his indie band The Smalls. The cowboy roots were deep, though, and he comfortably strode from the tall buildings back into the tall grass about 10 years ago and now he is both a city mouse and a country mouse.
"I live in the city but I lived (at the cabin) for a few weeks last year, but it's mostly a place I just go for a visit. It's only an hour from Edmonton," he said. "You have to haul water and chop wood. There was a moose on my deck, fresh tracks last week, eating snow off my picnic table."
It is a personal monument to rural life, for Lund, as is the man who built it.
"My uncle built it. He died last year, the guy I wrote the 'Bucking Horse Rider' and 'Hard On Equipment' (Tool For the Job) songs about. Cancer got him. He was one of my favourite people. He built log houses, scribes them all out and notches them himself. It's an art for sure, he did a great job on it."
Another human monument for Lund is fellow western singer-songwriter Tyson who is a godfather figure for Lund and the crop of ruralite rockers (not all of them country-based) that is growing wild across Canada right now (think of Ridley Bent, Rachelle Van Zanten, Hawksley Workman, Luke Doucet, Melissa McClelland, Dustin Bentall, etc.).
Lund and Tyson have done duets together, a CBC television special, and chew the fat on a regular basis. For an interview of Tyson in front of a live theatre audience, Lund was called in to ask the questions. It was about Tyson's new biography "The Long Trail" and "I was just going to wing it, but then I didn't," Lund said of the live interview. "I read his new book a couple of times, I read a bunch of past interviews, his other biography he wrote, I was really proud of myself for doing all that research. It really was a refresher. I learned a few new things, for certain, but I already knew quite a bit about him, just from knowing him.
"I've played a lot with some of his band mates, guys who have played with him over the years, and had stories about him. I asked a bunch of selfish questions, too, stuff that I wanted to know about. Everybody knows about the big hits so I went into some of the more obscure stuff."
In the Tyson book you'll find a few pages specifically about Lund. It is almost (maybe not almost) like Tyson is passing a torch to someone he has chosen for the title of keeper of the Canadian cowboy archetype.
Did Lund notice this happening?
"Yeah, kinda. It seems logical, and I get it intellectually, but it seems weird to me," because Tyson is still very capable of carrying the torch himself, Lund said.
A scroll through all Lund's solo albums demonstrates why it is both logical, and worthy of Tyson's blessing. Lund's latest album is called "Losin' Lately Gambler" and has been picked up - the first Lund album with an American label - by U.S. record company New West which should know how to handle him considering they also do the work for Steve Earle, John Hiatt, Kris Kristofferson, The Old 97's, Dwight Yoakum, Benn Lee and others of this outlaw ilk.
One of those American music outlaws will be riding shotgun with Lund and the Hurtin' Albertans when they perform at CN Centre on Saturday night. Lund has special guest John Evans joining him from Texas.
"He used to drive to all his gigs in an ambulance," Lund said. "He used to be a hell of a quarterback, a prospect for the NFL until injuries got him. I'm really looking forward to showing him a Canadian Rocky Mountain winter." They are playing Haines Junction on New Year's Eve so Prince George is a warm-up show in a number of ways.
Tickets to the show are on sale now at the CN Centre box office and Studio 2880.
