Tales of stuck trucks are lyrical fodder for Corb Lund’s “left-of-centre weirdo country”

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON SEPT. 15, 2005

By Steve Newton

The first time I interviewed Corb Lund, back in 2000, he was playing bass for the smalls, an Edmonton band that had just taken its raucous sound to the popular wintertime destination of Bosnia-Herzegovina.

These days Lund has left the hard-rock road behind, stuck on a cowboy hat, and launched a career as a shit-kickin’ country artist. When he checks in from an outdoor festival in Wainwright, Alberta, he claims that it was a natural switch to the Nashville sound.

“My family has been ranchers and cowboys for generations,” he says, “so it didn’t really leave my consciousness. And the majority of the time I was in the smalls I had this band on the side as well. So when the smalls just sort of ran their course, it seemed like the obvious time to fire up the other career.”

Lund’s debut recording as a solo country artist was 1995’s Modern Pain, which he originally issued in cassette form. For his 2002 release, Five Dollar Bill, he thought he’d try actual CDs, and so far he’s sold more than 30,000 units.

Now he’s got a new disc out called Hair in My Eyes Like a Highland Steer, and is getting play on Country Music Television for the tongue-in-cheek video-single “The Truck Got Stuck”. That playful ditty wasn’t penned in the hopes of having Ford and Chevrolet engage in a bidding war for rights to a TV ad, though.

“They all got stuck,” he points out of the song’s brand-name pickups. “I went out of my way to make it nonpartisan, ’cause I figure they’re all kinda overpriced.”

Lund-who actually drives an old Dodge truck his uncle used to have on his ranch-says he’s shocked that politically minded roots-rocker Steve Earle has licensed the title track of his latest album, The Revolution Starts Now, to Chevy. But that didn’t stop him from recruiting Harry Stinson, a former member of Earle’s band the Dukes, to produce Hair in My Eyes.

“He’s got a real good feel for left-of-centre weirdo country,” relates Lund, “and he’s really good at finishing touches. After writing these songs all by myself for, like, a year and a half, it’s really refreshing to have someone say, ‘Let’s speed it up a bit, I think this one needs a fiddle,’ that kinda thing.”

As well as the production talents of Stinson, Lund-who plays the Commodore Ballroom on Friday (September 16)-was eager to engage the help of a couple of music greats on the new CD. Canadian country icon Ian Tyson sings on one of Lund’s personal faves, “The Rodeo’s Over”, and American folk legend Ramblin’ Jack Elliott provides vocals, guitar, and-true to his name-some down-home rambling on the closer, “The Truck Got Stuck Talkin’ Blues”.

“We were in the studio recordin’ the tune,” recalls Lund, “and every time we’d do a take he’d do like a four- or five-minute conversation at the beginning of it, talkin’ about old Model As and stuff. So we just started rolling the tape, and that was the best part of the song.”