For a guy with a song called Talk Too Much, this new Corb Lund tour is a bold move. It's just him, a few guitars, and his gift of the gab.
Some of the Corb Lund storytelling goes into the lyrics but he'll also be chatting out loud a fair bit from song to song, town to town. He calls the whole trip "B.S. With C.L."
"I love my band and I'll always play with my band but it's kinda fun for me once in a while to do this, for a few reasons," he told The Citizen in a phone call from his home in Lethbridge. "One is I really enjoy the challenge of it, and it's fun interacting with the audience, but also because there's a certain segment of my audience that wants to rock out and drink beer, and that's great, I'm all for that, but there's also a segment of my audience that's focused on the lyrics and always ask me questions about 'who'd I write this about?' and 'was that a true story?' and 'what does this line mean?' This is kinda loose and fun. A lot of people in Western Canada have seen me a number of times with the band so this is an interesting change."
He'll be spontaneous but he will also bring up the social media conversation he's been soliciting. He wants people to use his Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and website platforms to send him questions you might want answered or comments you might want addressed. He'll talk about anything that strikes his fancy that night, from Tesla cars to the Edmonton Oilers youth movement to the minutia of his dense lyrics and schooled melodies.
On his latest record Things That Can't Be Undone, he has a song called S Lazy H about a farming brother and sister who turn against each other over the value of the farm - one sees lifestyle value in working the land and one sees monetary value in selling the land.
True story? Lund said yes and no.
"It's a combination of three or four stories I've heard," he said. "You know Holtman, from the truck song?" referring to the lyrical line "course Holtman didn't have nothin' better to do...'cept ranch" from the humourous hit tune The Truck Got Stuck. The Holtman family really is a farming clan from the Taber area of Alberta where Lund grew up on a ranch of his own.
"That's his brand, the S Lazy H," Lund explained, "but he and his sister are good."
Not so for many other Canadian farming families. The song, based on Lund's observations close to the topic, is an artistic dissertation on how hard it is to keep family farms together when parents pass on and various siblings are at odds over how to use the asset. If one sibling wants the value of their half, the other sibling can't usually afford to buy them out, so the farm's land-base gets cut in half and usually they were intrinsic halves to the operation. It sometimes forces the remaining, farming sibling to lose their half, too, because it took the whole thing to make a go of it.
Such is the reason Lund is so poetically appreciated by fans. He writes complete thoughts, often in complete sentences, using the vivid formula of "show, don't tell." In other words, he tells a helluva good story.
But he's also a well trained musician. He attended Grant MacEwan College's jazz program and specialized in bass. His musical mind was open wide even at the time, being as well versed in acoustic cowboy icon Wilf Carter as he was in metal monarchs Black Sabbath. He was the bass player in heavy punk band The Smalls when he first emerged onto the public's radar back in the 1990s.
His country streak was strong and painted in colourful Western hues. Out on his own, Lund galloped into gold and platinum territory with songs detailing military history, local folk stories, trades workers and livestock. He was the heir apparent to Ian Tyson (the two have done duets and television projects together). He was the new bard of the Canadian Rockies. He was the cowboy who made the city folk applaud and the rural folk nod knowingly. He was the end of a lot of sentences that started something like "...I don't like country music, but I like..."
Most if not all of his songs could be stamped with the words "based on a true story."
It's not a mysterious formula. It's an authenticity steak seared in a perfect rub of humour, honour, craftsmanship, education, literacy, kind heart, inquisitive mind, and ears that hear people.
He's the philharmonic cowboy. No, really. The night before he set off on the B.C. With C.L. tour, he did a red carpet gig at the soft-seat Jack Singer Auditorium with the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra.
"It's nerve wracking but it's super cool," he said. "I've done a couple of other shows like that and I've learned that the slow, more textural, interesting harmony ones work best. The quicker ones, the uptempo country ones, sound like a game show. At least, mine do." So he got the charts made for songs like The Truth Comes Out, She Won't Come To Me, This Is My Prairie, Spanish Armada, There Are No Roads Here, etc.
The foot-stompers in his repertoire, the aforementioned Truck Got Stuck, Hair In My Eyes Like A Highland Steer, I Wanna Be In The Cavalry, Five Dollar Bill, Hard on Equipment (Tool for the Job), The Roughest Neck Around, It's Time To Switch To Whiskey, Dig Gravedigger Dig, and so many others of that ilk are better done with his rocker buddies in The Hurtin' Albertans.
None of those scenarios will prevail on Monday night when Lund comes to Prince George. You'll get the man himself and just the man himself. It'll never be as personalized and as tailored to the moment.
Lund performs at Vanier Hall starting at
7 p.m. (He will also appear in Quesnel on Thursday and Williams Lake on Friday.)
Tickets are $45 available in advance at the Studio 2880 ticket desk (2880 15th Ave.), or call 250-563-2880 to charge by phone.
