By Sue Zalokar, Staff Writer
Corb Lund hails from a long line of cowboys. He grew up in
the foothills of the Rocky Mountains in Alberta, Canada, went to college to
study bass and jazz guitar and found himself playing bass in a hard rock/metal
band for over a decade. These days, he fronts his own country roots band, Corb
Lund and the Hurtin’ Albertans.
Though he is still building his fan base in the United
States, he has gained notoriety in his native Canada, winning the Canadian
Country Music Best Roots Artist of the Year award four years in a row.
Lund’s seventh album, Cabin Fever, was
released in August of last year. It was the result of a series of weeks spent
in a cabin he built with his long-time girlfriend and a favorite uncle. Within
weeks of finishing the cabin, he and his girlfriend split up and his uncle
died. It doesn’t get much more country than that.
Corb Lund will bring his Hurtin’ Albertans and their Cabin
Fever to Mississippi Studios on May 21.
S.Z.: I understand that you are quite
the history buff. What are some of the most interesting aspects of history for
you?
C.L.: I like all of it. I like when I can place
my family and my ancestors in particular places and times. I’m really
interested in the history of the cowboys in the West. My ancestors on both
sides are all from the States. My family came across the plains to Utah – they
were Mormons back then. They were raising cattle down there and they came to
Alberta at the turn of the century.
My favorite thing in all media in the last five years — I like
it better than movies or books or music — is a podcast that comes out of
Eugene. It’s called, “Hardcore History” by Dan Carlin. If you’ve never heard
it, he does this fantastic job of taking a historical period or series of
events and personalizing it and making it really human. I can’t say enough
about how awesome it is. He’s my hero, Dan Carlin.
S.Z.: As artist in residence at the
Glenbow Museum in Calgary, you recently curated an exhibit that combined your
music and your family’s history in the Albertan Province. Tell me a bit about
the exhibit, “No Roads Here – Corb Lund’s Alberta.”
C.L.: It was a really great experience. History
is woven through my songs. We took a few of them and took themes from each song
and made a bunch of mini displays within the space. There was one on
prohibition, another on the oil industry in Alberta. We also had themes on
ranching, rodeo, gambling, veterinary medicine and Mormonism. We used a
combination of the Glenbow’s artifacts and my own family’s heirlooms to make a
display. They did a great job.
S.Z.: You are a fourth generation
rancher. Do you ranch currently?
C.L.: No, I don’t know how that got started.
It’s embarrassing, actually. The truth is I’m from four or five generations of
ranchers, but I don’t ranch. I grew up that way, but somewhere along the way
one of the publicists from the city got that wrong and it keeps cropping up.
Maybe someday when I’m rich, I’ll do both. I grew up that way, and now I’m in
the city making music and singing about it.
S.Z.: For those who aren’t familiar
with your work, how would you describe what you do?
C.L.: I call it scruffy country or underground
country. I like the term subversive country. It’s a mirror of my life. The
first half of my life I spent around cattle and on horseback and having a very
Western experience. And the next part of my life I spent in a speed metal band
in the city, playing really underground music. When I write country songs, they
tend to be a little weird. They aren’t commercial country that fits in the
radio box.
S.Z.: You played bass in a punk,
hard-rock metal band, The Smalls, for a number of years. You all were quite the
DIY band, selling over 40,000 albums before dismantling in 2001. Can you talk a
bit about your time with The Smalls?
C.L.: It was really fun. I mean, it was lean
years, but it was very formative, musically. It’s interesting because now
everybody’s talking about working away from the mainstream and doing it
yourself, but that’s what we did from the beginning in that band. That’s what a
lot of punk bands did in those days and still do. When we started, we just sort
of assumed we would never get any support from the industry, and so we just
sort of made our own records and printed our own T-shirts and booked our own
tours and built our own audience that way. I carried that over into this band
(The Hurtin’ Albertans) too. As it turns out, we did get some commercial
interest, but for the most part my whole career has just been built on rolling
up your sleeves and making it happen.
I’m not as big of a star as I could potentially be if I
played ball, or if I was a little bit more palatable to the commercialized side
of things. It builds personal power. I don’t have to rely that much on the
radio playing my music or the media gatekeepers’ approval. I’ve built a
relationship over a number of years with my audience and they expect me to be
quirky. It doesn’t matter whether the industry is paying attention to me or
not. I can still play music and make a living at it — on my own terms.
S.Z.: What are the most common American
misconceptions about Canadians?
C.L.: One of them is people who fool around
with the Canadian accent. The “out and about” thing. That’s really an Eastern
Canadian accent. We sound a little more like Montanans, I think. People have to
remember that Canada is a massive country. It’s second only to Russia. We have
one-tenth the population that you have and it’s spread across this huge area,
so the cultural differences are quite large among Canadians. We don’t all have
the same accent. But I’ll give you this: We do say “eh” all the time. That’s
the one stereotype about Canadians that’s right. We say that a lot.
There are a lot of misconceptions about our health care
system.
S.Z.: Many people in the U.S. envy your
health care system.
C.L.: Only half. The other half thinks it’s
evil Socialism.
S.Z.: What do you think about your
health care system?
C.L.: I think it’s really good. Nothing’s
perfect of course, but it’s generally really good.
I want to be clear that I’m not preaching to it. America’s
free to have it’s own system obviously. (Sighs) This is a big discussion.
I think it has been misconstrued for political reasons in
the States. During the 2008 election, I was down there a lot — in blue states
and red states. And I talked politics all night with people. People have this
idea, or I kept hearing this statistic, that 1 in 6 people die waiting for
health care in Canada. It’s just not true.
Sometimes you have to wait a little while if you have to
have a shoulder replacement. If you have a serious issue, it’s addressed
quickly. My niece is 12 and she is battling stage-four cancer right now, and
she has had world-class care.
Another point that often comes up in the conversation (with
Americans) is “I don’t want a government bureaucrat between me and the doctor.”
Which I can understand, but it appears that the alternative is to have a
for-profit insurance company between you and your doctor. Having a bureaucrat
between you and your doctor can screw things up through ineptness, but having a
for profit corporation between you and the health care provider seems like a
guarantee that you’re going to get screwed over.
A telling example of (the success of) our healthcare system
is a few years ago the CBC — the National Radio Station — they had a public
vote on the top 10 Canadians in history, and I think Wayne Gretzky, the hockey
player, was second or third, and the person that was number one, his name was
Tommy Douglas. He’s the politician who brought into place the Universal Health
Care system.
You’re asking all the hard questions. I don’t want to dwell
on this and alienate all of the cowboys in Oregon.
S.Z.: You come from a seemingly
conservative, rural background, but your songwriting makes social commentary on
any number of topics. What is that like? To walk that line?
C.L.: My dad is a kind of renaissance cowboy.
He’s very open-minded. I try to be practical. I don’t really have a bedrock
ideology that I operate from. I try to think about individual issues rather
than trying to apply a liberal or conservative model to anything. I tend to
look at a problem and think, what would be the most commonsense way to solve
this?
S.Z.: What are your thoughts about gun
control?
C.L.: Oh god, this is for sure going to get me
into trouble, right? Another misconception about Canadians is that we don’t
have guns. We’ve actually got lots and lots and lots of guns. We just don’t
shoot each other very much. That’s not a criticism, that’s just a fact.
I’ve thought a lot about the reasons for this. There are
other countries besides Canada. The Swiss, for example. It’s actually a
requirement, from what I understand, for the bulk of their male citizens to be
in the militia. And not only are they allowed to have assault rifles, it’s
actually required that most male citizens in Switzerland have an assault rifle
in their home that they qualify on regularly. And the murder rate there is
quite low.
The question is, why is the violence rate so high in the
States? I have a couple of theories.
S.Z.: What are they?
C.L.: One of them is that it has to do with
your history. The armed revolution aspect, the founding of America. I think it
is woven into your culture that way, maybe.
Secondly, I wonder sometimes if it has something to do with
diversity. America is made up of a whole melting pot of people. A place like
Switzerland is pretty homogeneous. So I think America lends itself to an “us
and them” kind of a mentality. I’ve thought about it a lot —— wondering why the
level of violence (in America) is what it is. What do you think?
S.Z.: I grew up with a grandfather who
had enough handguns and rifles to arm a militia. He made sure that I understood
how guns worked, how to clean them and care for them and how to shoot them.
Whenever we would see one another, we always made a trip to the range. That was
a fascinating experience.
Having said that, I have made it
to this point in my life and I have never needed a gun.
C.L.: What if someone breaks into your house
though?
S.Z.: Yes, that would be horrible. I
would hate for my last thought to be, “Damn, I wish I had a gun.” I try not to
live my life in fear.
C.L.: It’s like buying insurance. I buy car
insurance and I don’t think I’m going to get in a car accident, but if I do.
You can outlaw guns all you want, but if there are maniacs out there who want
to hurt people, they are going to do it. If they can’t get a gun, then they
will do it with an ax or a baseball bat. I’m skeptical that guns laws would
work. If it’s not the access to guns that is the issue, but it’s the people
that’s the issue, I don’t know how in the hell you legislate that.
This article appears in 2013-05-10.