Monday, September 13, 2004

 

True Grit: ROBERT EVERETT-GREEN talks to Corb Lund, a real Alberta cowboy...

From the Globe and Mail (Canada)
Corb Lund's first audience can be seen on the cover of his CD Five Dollar Bill, in an old photo of a couple dozen cowboys hanging around a fence. They're watching the boy on the bucking steer, though they can't see what the camera can: the teeth-clenching, oh-my-god grimace on Lund's face.

Lund gave up competitive rodeo just when it came time to graduate to bull-riding, "the original extreme sport," as he calls it. The animals had already taught him their most important lesson, which was that any time you're saddled with something that doesn't suit you, you've got to kick and twist until it's gone.

In his quiet way, Lund has spent his adult life doing just that. Every major step in his career has involved shucking off something that didn't quite fit. He's a rebel western musician in the tradition of Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings and, like them, he had to go the long way round to find his own voice.

You can hear the oppositional spirit of that voice in almost every song from Five Dollar Bill, whose recent prominence on country radio and TV has helped the Corb Lund Band earn three nominations at this year's Canadian Country Music Awards, which will be handed out in Edmonton tonight. The sound of the music is mainly vintage western, but the songs express an acquaintance with irony never heard from the likes of Wilf Carter.

Read the article
Globe and Mail


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