INTERVIEW: Corb Lund Calls Cultural Appropriation on Commercial Country
Corb Lund sounds as country as country ever was – all while criticizing some of the mainstream country stars he shares airspace and some of his audience with. Sound familiar? I think George Strait’s 2003 song Murder on Music Row deals with this. Also almost every story about Corb Lund.
It might be tempting to brand all rural people in Alberta as homophobic pro-lifers who drive pick-up trucks, drink whiskey, raise hell, love Jesus, vote conservative no matter what, don’t believe in climate change, support the Truck Nutters, and have their radio glued to CISN Country 103.9 FM 24 hours a day – where one can hear “country” equated with moral high ground, naive homilies to the workin’ man, and in some cases pure anti-intellectual drivel. And so on and on. It’s a stereotype with some basis in truth, as ever. Former CISN music director Mike McGuire (a huge Corb Lund supporter, by the way) put it nicely, “Great country songs still exist, dumb country songs sell more tickets.”
Don’t blame CISN. They’re just playing to the lowest common denominator with the same stuff every commercial radio station in North America gets fed from the Nashville Hit Factory. It’s about money.
Ahead of his Back to the Barrooms stint at the Starlite Room May 5-7 (an event that had been scheduled and cancelled twice before due to the pandemic), Lund says in a phone interview, “I know a lot of ranchers and a lot of farmers, real ag people – and hardly any of them like that music. They think it’s a total appropriation of their life, all that bullshit about dirt roads and pickup trucks, it’s just vapid. They think it’s just a whoring out of their lifestyle. I’m sure there are rural people who like that kind of music, but I don’t know anybody.”
Hold up there, hoss. Credibility check: Corb’s songs contain references to trucks and dirt roads, so is the pot calling the kettle black here? One of his biggest hits is called Truck Got Stuck. Another deals with rig workers, other songs with horses and cows.
He comes by his subject matter honestly. Lund grew up on a Southern Alberta family ranch owned since 1902, did the rodeo when he was a teen (including steer riding, as bulls without balls tend to be less aggressive so they let boys ride them; one graduates to bulls at 16, at which point Corb was out), and after a brief stint in music at MacEwan University where he formed a heavy metal band called the smalls with three friends, the prodigal son returned to country music with a vengeance. It’s been eight albums since 2002 and steady touring. He’s recently joined the fight against allowing coal mining in the Rocky Mountains. “If we let it happen, it’s not going to be good for any Albertan,” he says. Of course Lund and everyone else had to take two years off, and now there’s two new albums of fresh material that haven’t been toured live. His latest is Songs My Friends Wrote, which is just that (songs by Hayes Carll, Ian Tyson, this weekend’s opening act Mike Plume, and more). One track from 2020’s Agricultural Tragic is noteworthy, a duet with Jaida Dreyer (a Canadian singer raised in the American South) called I Think You Oughta Try Whiskey.
He sings: “Whiskey makes me feel as though I’m smart and tough and tall. It makes me think of things I never thought about at all.”
She responds: “Whiskey makes you act as if the whole world owes you something, and I love you, but when you’re that high, you ain’t all that, dumplin’.”
Sound familiar?
Yet even in the most hokey of country tropes Lund sounds like he’s taking the piss out of them. Name another artist who could slip in a sly comment about genetically modified canola into a song about a truck getting stuck.
The key difference, Lund says, isn’t so much about style as it is about intent.
“I feel very grounded in the stuff I’m singing about, it’s my family history,” he says, noting that while he doesn’t actually get to do much cowboy stuff these days, and doesn’t even own a horse, he adds, “I’m not sure how much time Springsteen spent in the New Jersey slums after his first few records.
“I think there’s stupid, vapid, manufactured bullshit in all styles, rock or urban or country, but most have cool stuff under the surface. In country’s case it comes out of Nashville. It’s a mainstream corporate-ized product. They’re not trying to make art, they’re trying to sell records. It’s different approach than me or Ian Tyson or Hayes Carll. We’re trying to make art, more or less.”
