Corb Lund is one of those artists who have reached all of the goals put before him. His videos are seen on CMT. You can turn on the dial and hear his songs right along side those of Big and Rich and Kenny Chesney. He was awards an Artist of the Year award and an Album of the Year for his newest release Hair in My Eyes Like a Highland Steer. That album, along with its predecessor, Five Dollar Bill, have both gone Gold, selling over 500,000 copies each.
But all of this success has come in his native Canada and doesn’t easily transfer to a big career start in the States and even the recognition he has received in the Great White North has been hard won. ԉt’s kind of weird, too, ‘cause even up here, I’ve been doing this for ten or twelve years,ԠLund recounts, ԩt’s always sort been an underground, independent release kind of thing, this is the first time that we’ve really had an sort of industry attention this whole time. I’ve had a pretty good career for the last number of years, but it’s always been real grassroots, kind of under the radar, this is the first time it’s really been sort of accepted and recognized by the industry and stuff, so that’s interesting.ԍ

Perhaps it is out of our own ignorance or shortsightedness to see very far beyond our own borders that many do not even realize that there is a Country music scene in Canada. ԉ don’t have that much in common musically with the sort of straight ahead, sort of vanilla, cookie cutter kind of Country stuff, but there’s a lot of stuff in Canada that sort of aspires to that. It’s kind of weird ‘cause there’s a lot of acts in Canada that do this imitation of this Nashville thing that I didn’t like even to begin with when it was done by the Nashville people,ԠLund says with a laugh.
Ԕhere’s a lot of cool stuff in Nashville, but I’m talking about the Mainstream Corporate Country stuff. So there’s a lot of that stuff up here, but on the other hand there’s a whole underground sort of Country scene as well which I’ve been part of for years and that’s usually where the good stuff comes from. And we’re lucky because it’s crossed over in to the mainstream world somehow up here. Like up here they’re playing us with all of the mainstream Country people, which is really strange.ԍ

So what’s next? Conquer America.
With all of the success the band has celebrated in 2006, coming to America is like starting from square one. ԛI]t’s kind of a challenge though,ԠLund says, ԩt’s cool.ԍ
With a release that Lund feels is on par with anything else on the market, he has assembled a team around him to make that push into the States. The songwriting on Highland Steer continues to improve and Lund’s band, the Hurtin’ Albertans, have been perfecting their road show on recent tours through the States.
In his march south Lund has aligned himself with three allies that have helped him improve as he grows as an artist.
His first ally, one from across the border, embedded in Nashville, is Harry Stinson, who produced both Five Dollar Bill and Highland Steer. When it came time to record 2002’s Five Dollar Bill Lunds’ former manager suggested they meet with Stinson. ԉ have to admit, I think that was five or six years ago probably when we did that first one, I wasn’t aware of him and his pedigree when I first worked with him because my manager at the time knew him. We were looking for a producer and she said, ‘oh, I know this guy’ and we went into the studio when he was up here for a show and did a couple of songs over the weekend and it was awesome. And then I started digging around on the ‘net and was like ‘holy shit!’Ԡlaughs Lund, ԓpeaking of cool stuff in Nashville, he’s like the Zen master of all the cool music in Nashville.ԍ

Another ally is Canadian Country/Folk artist Ian Tyson who began his career in the folk duo Ian & Sylvia in the early 1960s. The influential duo also released a Country-Rock-Folk cult classic under the name Great Speckled Bird in the late Sixties. After a brief retirement to tend to his ranch in 1979, Tyson returned to recording and followed a more Country direction.
ԗell it was probably inevitable that I would meet Ian at some point ‘cause we’re both from Alberta, we both have similar backgrounds as far as the Western stuff goes and we’re on the same label up here,ԠLund explains. ԉ meet him a few years ago, I can’t even remember where, but I’ve known him quite a while, because we are both from Alberta, but he’s been a real supporter too, he’s sang on the record. I go up there to his place and we pick and drink beer.ԍ
That friendship lead to meeting another folk legend, Ramblin’ Jack Elliot. ԗe played a show together a number of years ago, in Alberta, I opened for him and we ended up hanging out and drinking beer until five in the morning,Ԡhe laughs. Ԉe took a shine to me, as it were. We’re buddies now, I call him once in a while and he tells me 45 minute stories. One of the songs that has, surprisingly been the most played up here is the one about the trucks getting stuck and that was a talking blues and he was the guy that inspired me to, I mean I’d heard that stuff before but, after getting to know him a little bit and playing with him, I went back and dug into my Dylan and Guthrie, all that sort of stuff and that was loosely the inspiration to write a talking blues song. I was happy to be the guy who got a talkin’ blues song on CMT up here, I was proud of that.ԍ

Ԃut that’s been one of the coolest things about the whole last few years of my career is meeting the ‘old guard’ and the guys you’ve listened to for years and looked up to,Ԡhe muses, ԉt’s pretty neat.ԍ
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The music on Highland Steer is an eclectic mix that represents Lund’s influences and tastes. Growing up on a ranch, Lund listened to many of the great Country artists of the late-’60s and ‘70s such as Willie Nelson and Johnny Horton (“Marty Robbins was a huge one.”).
But not all of his influences were stars: ԁctually, it’s interesting, one of my earliest influences were my grandfathers because they’re both cattle ranchers, they both came up from Nevada and Utah, around the turn of the century our families came up from America. When I was a kid they used to sing old- they weren’t singers, they were just cowboys and they were terrible singers, but (laughs) they had these songs that were kind of old cowboy oral tradition history songs that predate recorded music, like the ‘Strawberry Roan’ and ‘The Streets of Laredo’ and that sort of stuff. Which is really cool and I didn’t know this at the time, but thinking back on it now it’s like a real connection to a time when those ballad songs were documentations of peoples exploits and they would be passed around from guy to guy working, before anyone was thinking about making money with music they were singing songs as entertainment and a way of recording their own history. So the first songs I learned were ‘Strawberry Roan’ and one called ‘When the Works all Done This Fall’ and a handful of them,Ԡhe says.
Around age 15, like many adolescents are prone to do, Lund discovered Rock ‘n’ Roll via bands such as Black Sabbath. Ԕhat was what actually got me into playing music, I played indie rock for a number of years as well as this stuff,Ԡhe recalls.
While keeping one foot in the Country music he grew up with, Lund began a fairly lengthy career in a modern Rock outfit, The Smalls, which drew heavily on the Sabbath influences. As a primary writer in the band while also writing songs for his Country side project, Lund continued to stretch himself creatively.

ԉ think that that’s had an interesting affect on my writing style because I think that if I’d, growing up in a rural setting, if I’d gone into making music directly without getting into other stuff, I think my music would be a lot more straight ahead, like normal Country and Western music, but having been in an underground indie rock band for eight or ten years where individuality and uniqueness is rewarded instead of discouraged, I think that’s had an influence on my writing style. I think my writing style is a blend of Western heritage with independent irreverence,Ԡhe laughs, Աuirky.ԍ
That quirky sense of humor shows up on songs like the aforementioned talking blues Ԕhe Truck Got Stuck,ԠԈurtin’ AlbertanԠand one of the albums most popular songs, ԁll I Want To Do Is Play CardsԠ(“That’s one of my primary distractions when I’m trying to get songs written, so I figured I could use it as field reference that way I could justify all of my hours in the card room as field research.”).
But a quirky sense of humor in songwriting can sometimes be a drawback as many critics will be quick to write you off as a novelty. ԙeah, they have a couple times,ԠLund chuckles, Ԃut, I don’t know, whatever. I think about the stuff that I like to listen to and, I don’t know, I’m a big Jerry Reed fan. It’s like, I do what I do and if people like it, they like it. I mean there’s more lighthearted stuff on this record than my last one, I didn’t do it on purpose, that’s just the way it turned out, but there’s actually more fun kind of stuff on this record. Actually, my favorite tunes on the record are the darker ones like ‘The Truth Comes Out’ and the one with Tyson is one of my favorites, ‘The Rodeo’s Over.’ԍ

Ԃut on the other hand up here in Canada which is kind of a microcosm of the music industry internationally or whatever, it’s interesting, it’s been the novelty, the hooky songs have been the ones that have drawn people in to buying the record and then when they buy the record they go ‘oh, wow, there’s some interesting stuff on there.
ԉ’ve heard a lot of records that are a lot of shoe-gazing introspective stuff and that kind of gets me down (laughs). I don’t know, I think on a record it is important to have a variety of moods on it.ԍ
The moods of Highland Steer navigate between the advice from his grandfathers on ԁlways Keep an Edge on Your KnifeԠto the trucker song Ԉurtin’ Albertan.ԠStory songs such as Ԕhe Truth Comes OutԠand ԃounterfeiter’s BluesԠreveal Lunds’ songwriting chops and his dual love of story songs and history. ԙeah, I’m a sucker for the old-fashioned stuff in all things but in music I always look to the past for stuff. There’s other stuff on the record, there’s a bit of ragtime, Western Swing.ԍ

The variety seems to be serving him well as he continues to see his exposure grow and his fan base widen. But regardless of whether he makes it big internationally, he will continue to do what he believes he was born to do.
ԉ’m pretty serious about music so I’m kind of doing it either way. So I made the decision a long time ago to do this and I decided I would do this whether I had a lot of help or not, but finally it’s nice to have some.ԍ