Corb Lund - The Subversive Storyteller

Canadian singer/songwriter Corb Lund has accomplished a lot over his multiple decades in music, from his stint in punk rockers The Smalls, to his wry and heartfelt catalogue of country music - with a solid swag of awards along the way. But despite years of urging, he still hasn’t got me to sample the podcast ‘Hardcore History’.

“You ever listen to it?” he asks, as we chat over the phone from our respective corners of the globe.

When I admit I haven’t yet gotten around to it, he reels off tantalizing details from his favourite episodes. “The one about guns and horses is really good. It’s called ‘Guns and Horses’. There’s one called “History Under the Influence”, which is about how booze and drugs have influenced historical figures and events. In World War II, Stalin was a notorious vodka drunk, Churchill was a raging drunk half the time too and Hitler was getting amphetamine injections. It must have had some effect on things, right?”

It’s this ear for the underexploited, odd and characteristic details from history and his own experiences that make Corb such a unique and impressive songwriter. A knack for story songs and a budding interest in military history resulted in his remarkable 2007 concept album ‘Horse Soldier! Horse Soldier!’, and ‘Sadr City’ from his new LP ‘Things That Can’t Be Undone’.

“I ended up getting a lot of military guys coming to the shows after ‘Horse Soldier’ came out. I just keep talking to them and one guy was really interesting. He was a really well-read guy and we got along really well. He’d been in that battle in Iraq just after they declared Mission Accomplished and he told me the story about it. And then I met another guy who’d been in the same battle. It was a pretty big one.

I didn’t really make anything up. I just put their stories into meter and put a melody to it.”

Corb is in no way a typical country singer. He’s one of the few contemporary artists in the genre who could accurately be called country-and-western. He draws on the tradition of artists like Marty Robbins as much as 70s Waylon-and-Willie Outlaw country. His audience is just as unusual, and contains a diverse spread of opinions and views.

“We have a really wide and interesting mix of people coming to the show. Seems like our music is a mirror to them. They pick out the songs that they identify with and that’s who they think we are.

It’s funny, it’s actually really acute with the Horse Soldier record. A lot of military guys love that record and come to the shows now and there’s a couple of tank units using the Cavalry song as a regimental theme song. Then I’ve had the more artistic lefty types tell me they thought it was a great anti-war record. It’s weird, I’m not sure if it was a good or a bad thing. Seems like the points of view I take up in the songs is quite different sometimes.”

While Johnny Cash never shot a man in Reno – to watch him die or for any other reason – these days country songs tend to shy away from portraying the point of view of a character, other than the one the singer plays all the time. Brad Paisley is the warm-hearted wise-ass, Eric Church is the iconoclastic renegade, Dierks Bentleyis the frisky road warrior. But Corb often inhabits many distinct perspectives in his songs, some seemingly contradictory.

“People don’t always understand that I’m singing in character, like a book. When Charles Dickens writes something in quotes, it means the character in his novel said that. It doesn’t mean Charles Dickens believes that. People forget that with music sometimes. 

I’ve got a song that kind of glorifies oil riggers and a song about people fighting against oil and gas on their land. People think it’s a dichotomy, but it’s just different points of view.”

Another quality that marks Corb out is his deft mix of tone. While he can pen pitch black stories of corrupt military scandals (‘Student Visas’) and heartfelt songs of love lost, many of his better known songs are from the lighter side of his catalogue – like talking blues hit ‘Truck Got Stuck’. His latest album leans toward the former.

“There’s not a lot of fun stuff on this record. The songs I’m most known for with a lot of people are the more fun ones. There’s not much of that, aside from ‘Washed-Up Rock Star Factory Blues’. But beyond that the rest of it’s pretty dark. I like dark.”

I wondered if including the tale of a musician forced to get a real job was a conscious effort to balance the lyrical content of songs like musically dynamic but morally dark opener ‘Weight of the Gun’.

“In fact, I debated whether I should put it on at all. I thought it might be out of place. I don’t really go in with a checklist. I just write a bunch of songs that accurately reflect where my head’s at over that year and a half between albums. The factory song is a good one. I knew it was a good one, but I debated in my head whether it fit on that record. But I think now it does fit. It gives it a balance, because the rest of it’s kind of heavy.”

As comfortable as he is with controversial subject matter, Corb is wary of crossing the line into preachiness or political posturing.

“I try not to be too politically heavy handed in my stuff. Some people do, and I think there’s a place for that, but I think there’s a place for music that transcends politics. My stuff is sort of political sometimes, but it’s subtle. Sometimes we forget and let day to day financial things and political things be everything we talk about, but I think music can transcend that. I try not to tell people how to think, I just present them with a story and they get what they want from it.”

Sturgill Simpson - An Americana Original

“I’ll be completely honest with you man. I don’t really listen to music.”

Of course, Sturgill Simpson is exaggerating. What the 37-year old Kentucky-born Americana singer-songwriter really means is, he doesn’t listen to anything recorded since the Reagan administration.

“I have albums that I listen to as touchstones on a regular basis, at least once a month.  Willie Nelson’s ‘Phases and Stages’ is a huge influence. A lot of Beatles, Marvin Gaye, Elton John, Sam Cooke, the Stooges, David Bowie.”

Pretty expansive taste for an artist often heralded as the second coming of outlaw country legend Waylon Jennings. But a close listen to Simpson’s LPs, particularly his latest award-winning album ‘Metamodern Sounds in Country Music’, reveals him to be far more complex and diverse than any ‘retro’ artist.

“I feel like I’ve finally been given this opportunity to express all of my influences that I’ve gathered my entire life and I’m trying to do something original. I feel like if I find somebody modern that I really love and listen to a lot, ultimately that’s going to show up in my writing.

Jason Isbell’s a great friend of mine, he’s an incredible talent, but I still haven’t heard all of ‘Southeastern’. I got about three or four songs into it and went ‘This is too good man, I can’t listen to this.’ It was going to inevitably show up in my work.”

That commitment to originality extends to the subject matter of his lyrics. Eschewing the classic country subject matter of heartbroken barroom tales, in favor of songs about drug experimentation, philosophy and the dangers of living out your fantasies. It’s tempting to read a lot of the songs on ‘Metamodern’ as the self-aware memoir of a misspent youth, but Simpson pushes back against the notion that he’s a recovering addict.

“I think there’s a lot of misconception out there about who I am. I know a lot of people got so hung up in that line in ‘Turtles All The Way Down’ with drug references. I think I was trying to say I tried all those things and didn’t really learn much from it.

I did an interview once and said I spent most of the first time I lived in Nashville in 2005 in the bottom of a bottle, which was true. But it was never waking up with shaky hands going ‘I need a drink’. It was more self-medicating depression. Then I went to work on the railroad and I didn’t have any need to do that anymore. I found a lot of clarity. I haven’t really used drugs or anything like that since my mid-20s. I am sober now.”

With that sobriety has come a focus and direction, spurred on by the encouragement of his wife Sarah. As he tells it, it was her who made the decision that they should move to Nashville a few years ago, so Sturgill could make a serious go at his musical career.

“I know without her encouragement, I never would’ve done it. I’m not an ambitious person, to a fault. I’ve learned, or I guess accepted, that I’m an artist. I never really knew that when I was younger. There were points in my life where I put music down, just because it was always something I did more as a self-therapeutic hobby, but it never brought me much fruition or anything outside the way of direct personal comfort.

But in the times when I wasn’t playing music, I was always very miserable or found myself, without even realising it, very unhappy and even angry and discontent with the world around me.

Looking back now, I realise it’s probably because I wasn’t doing what I was supposed to be doing. She thankfully recognised what I was supposed to be doing, even if I didn’t know it, and encouraged me to pursue that. I’m very fortunate to have someone like that in my life, or I don’t think any of that would be happening right now, to be perfectly honest with you.”

Teaming up with affable denim enthusiast and record producer Dave Cobb led to two acclaimed albums, a generous swag of Americana Music Awards and now his first tour of Australia (around next Easter’s Byron Bay Bluesfest). The move seems to have paid off.

Many artists would be bitter about not finding success until their late 30s, but I put it to Simpson that part of what makes him so artistically effective is the maturity and perspective he’s gained, something he wouldn’t have had ten years ago.

“There is an extreme benefit to having the focus and clarity and reflection at 37,” he agrees. “Along with sobriety and focus and knowing I have to support a family and take care of a child. It’s brought what I can only describe as an intense focus.

I might not be ambitious in terms of chasing a commercial career or winning a bunch of trophies or being on TV, but now I’ve been given this opportunity for a reason. I worked very hard but at the same time, there’s a lot of people that would literally kill to be in my position, so I can’t take that for granted.

Signing with Atlantic, I now have the resources available to make the absolute best music I can possibly make. That’s really all I’m concerned and focused on right now, just making sure that I do that, and not just take it for granted.”

There’s a question going forward, as Simpson’s commercial success and acclaim matches his drive, focus and quality of output: Can you be happy and make effective country music?

“More than anything, I enjoyed the challenge of trying to find new avenues to writing country songs. I’m a very happy, content husband and father. I’m looking for new ways to express other emotions we all share in the human experience through the music I make as honestly as I can.”

The Return of Laura Bell Bundy

When an artist takes five years between albums, you might assume they’ve been taking it easy, charging their batteries before heading back into the spotlight. That might be true for anyone but Laura Bell Bundy. For her, “time off” just isn’t a thing.

Bundy’s boundless energy has seen her darting between songwriting, touring, Tony-nominated stints on Broadway and starring roles on various TV shows. Talking to her is like chatting to a double-shot latte – even down the phone, at the end of a packed week for the blonde Kentucky native. At different points in our conversation, she references Lucille Ball and breaks into song. Just a few days earlier, she launched her new album “Another Piece of Me” at a late night show at a Nashville gay bar.

“There’s something about being at that kind of club that you can just throw caution to the wind,” she says. “It was really really fun. I’ve had so much support from the gay community, so it was a perfect place to do an album release. I called it the ‘Laura Bell Bundy’s album is coming out party’.”

That inclusive spirit positions her slightly out of the mainstream country box, even as she releases her most country record to date.  “Another Piece of Me” comes almost exactly five years after her country debut “Achin and Shakin”, a mix of a danceable, high energy tracks and soulful, heartfelt songs (the “Shakin” and “Achin” sides respectively).

While it looked to the outside world like Bundy had shifted her focus entirely to her acting career, she had quietly been working away at new material, continuing to write with Nashville A-listers and cut demos.

“I knew it was time to be making another record as soon I finished the last one. It was just a matter of when would be a good time to release it. I woke up every day and I just wrote. I would write on my own or I would do writing sessions or demo sessions or whatever.”

After wrapping up runs on hit TV shows “Anger Management” and “Hart of Dixie”, Laura set about sorting through the dozens of songs she’d written, trying to find a theme for the record that would help her cull down the list.

“I think having the song “Another Piece of Me”, which I wrote with Kristian Bush, helped a lot. I really loved that song and thought: ‘this is the theme of the record. The many pieces of me and my journey’.

It’s the story of where I’ve been over the past five years, but I really do think that the themes in the record are still relevant to my experience now.”

While she has received much acclaim for her work performing other people’s words and inhabiting other characters, Bundy works hard to make her music “honest, authentic and truthful”. Nowhere is this more in evidence than the song “China and Wine”.

“It’s the most personal song on the album. Probably the most honest I could get about my experience being a child of a broken home. The idea in the song is that I’m imagining what it was like when my parents were happy. They’d made an agreement that they would be together forever and the process of me dealing with their separation at fourteen years old and not understanding why this was happening, and now to get to the point where you’re an adult and you can look back and have a lot more clarity and understand what it’s like to be in a relationship that doesn’t work. I have a lot of forgiveness and gratefulness that they decided to be honest with each other and be healthy about it rather than destroy each other.”

Writing the song has made the self-confessed “commitment-phobe” come to terms with her own ideas about love and marriage.

“I can still say at the end of the day that I’m hopeful about the possibilities of my own marriage, if I have one one of these days. And that’s been a process for me. The song ends and there’s a good feeling, not a bad feeling. ‘China and wine/everything is fine’. We’re delicate and over time, we become richer and more full bodied. When I played it for my dad, he was pretty emotional.”

Honesty cuts both ways. For Bundy, authenticity isn’t just about confessional ballads, but cheeky romantic numbers like “Let’s Pretend We’re Married” and “She Only Wants to Dance”. After all, this is a woman who recently made an effort to celebrate National Bourbon Day, despite being stuck in an airport.

“I was in the Nashville airport on the way back to Los Angeles. And I didn’t really want to drink because it’d been a crazy weekend, but I had to do it because it’s National Bourbon Day!”

Aussies got a taste of Laura up close when she performed here for the first time back in March, as part of the massive CMC Rocks QLD festival. As well as co-hosting the TV coverage of the festival with local star Morgan Evans, Laura played the main stage – and was knocked out by the audience response.

”I was really genuinely surprised that there were people in the audience who were singing my songs back to me, even ones that hadn’t been released in Australia. I saw this girl on her boyfriend’s shoulders in the crowd. She was singing all of these songs, and I was like ‘How did she get these songs? YouTube? Facebook?’

I really enjoyed talking to everybody after the show and doing the signing. My one regret was not making my trip longer so I could spend more time in Australia.”

With “Another Piece of Me” out and Laura’s focus back on her musical career, hopefully we can look forward to seeing her in Oz again soon. Fingers crossed it won’t be another five years before country album number three.