It seems incongruous that this fine country-rockin’ band should come all the way from Canada to play a half-empty room above a pub on a chilly, January midweek night on the British south coast. That they do so with such gusto and aplomb is hugely impressive. By the end, they’ve filled the place with a whooping hoedown and made it feel like a honkytonk bar somewhere off a lost highway in a mythic America, yet with the wry, modern, liberal-minded twist of Corb Lund’s lyrics.
Lund grew up on Canada’s endless prairie farmland and, indeed, he plays a couple of songs about cows during the set (one of them, “Highland Steer”, is particularly well received by a Scottish member of the audience). He’s had a 20 year career, releasing nine albums, and is, appropriately, on the same label as Willie Nelson and Steve Earle. His band – guitar, drums and double bass – are called the Hurtin’ Albertans, although he later admits the drummer comes from Ohio. They all have beards and there’s much denim going on. The singer himself is clean-shaven. He wears a thick red-and-black work coat over a red plaid shirt and has an attachment on his mic stand within which sits an occasionally replaced bottle of Stella that he sips.
The band kick off with the folky clap-along of “Dig Gravedigger Dig” but their set runs all over the place, from the sweet-strummed homesickness for the Rockies of 2005’s “Little Foothills Heaven”, featuring yodelling and Hawaiian-sounding steel guitar, to the military drum tattoos of Lund’s self-proclaimed tribute to Johnny Horton’s historical ballads, “I Wanna Be in the Cavalry”. One of the great pleasures of Lund’s songs is that, unlike the tendency in modern songwriting to offer vague universals interpreted according to taste, his lyrics are specific, literate, witty and funny, often telling stories. The ebullient “Bible on the Dash” details how the good book saves him time and again from traffic cops (“It’s better than insurance, registration or lying/It’s better than these fake IDs I have to keep buying/It’s even better than an envelope stuffed with cash/They always said it’d save me, that old bible on the dash”) or the sing-along snap of his history of the cavalry, “Horse Soldier! Horse Soldier!”.
He plays a few off his new album Things That Can’t Be Undone, including the nostalgic “Run This Town”, but I keep shouting out for “Washed-Up Rock Star Factory Blues” from it as it so brilliantly displays his dry humour (and has a great harmonised chorus). He tells us it’s too tricky to play but he might come back to it later. In the meantime, he turns the place into a veritable country honk with songs such as “Weight of the Gun” and the bovine-centric “Cows Around” (“Everything is better with cows around”).
When the encore does arrive, the band assays a messy, enjoyable stab at “Washed-Up Rock Star Factory Blues” but best of all is the alcoholic explosion of “Time to Switch to Whisky”, wherein the now booze-sodden venue, myself included, shout along (“It’s time to switch to whisky - we've been drinkin’ beer all night”). I am new to Corb Lund but if this is what he can do with a half-empty venue, I cannot wait to see him play a festival or the like. The contagious bravado and dynamic songwriting of Lund and his talented band sent me out into the night buzzing on a cracking good time had by all.
Overleaf: Watch the video for "Bible on the Dash"
