Corb Lund Put the Western in 'Country & Western' at Stickyz on Friday Night

by Julian Spivey

Aprille Hanson-Spivey Photo

The term country and western doesn’t really apply much to country music these days but when it comes to Corb Lund you can use the term without drawing any strange looks. Lund and his band the Hurtin’ Albertans brought their brand of Canadian country and western to Little Rock’s Stickyz Rock ‘N’ Roll Chicken Shack on Friday, November 17 for a terrific night of music spanning his nearly 30 years on the road.

Opening with a cover of his friend Hayes Carll’s “Little Rock,” those of us in attendance could tell we were in for something special on Friday night as Lund and the boys seemed to be pumped for their first performance at Stickyz since before the Covid pandemic.

Lund kept the rocking country coming with a couple of my favorite tracks from his 2020 release Agricultural Tragic in the tribute to old cowboys, “Old Men” and “90 Seconds of Your Time,” a song about trying to talk an Army Ranger friend out of killing some folks.  

I became introduced to Lund through his wonderful 2012 album Cabin Fever, which to this day remains my favorite album of his. But as someone with a large amount of favorite musicians, I’ve never really found the time to delve into his pre-2012 releases so I found myself singing along and enjoying his last decade’s work a bit more than maybe some in the audience, who clearly have been with him longer as fans and perhaps enjoyed his earlier folk-western tunes like “Horse Soldier, Horse Soldier,” “I Wanna Be in the Cavalry” and “Roughest Neck Around.”

Cabin Fever clearly means a lot to Lund too as it was the album, despite now being 11 years old, that he performed the most tracks off of on Friday night, including one that he said he hadn’t done in a while in the story song “Priceless Antique Pistol Shoots Startled Owner,” which I was thrilled to see live and remains one of my all-time favorite song titles to this day.

Among my other favorite performances from Cabin Fever were “The Gothest Girl I Can,” which has a ‘50s rockabilly sound to it, the depressing “One Left in the Chamber,” which likely has multiple meanings depending on how you want to take it, and “Dig Gravedigger Dig,” possibly the most fun stomp about gravediggers in music history.

My favorite song off Cabin Fever is “September,” one that was saved for the encore of a show and done as a medley with a couple of his other songs “Run This Town” and “Losin’ Lately Gambler,” which was slightly disappointing but better than not having heard any of it at all. I particularly loved the yodeling in “September” and “Priceless Antique Pistol Shoots Startled Owner,” for that matter. You don’t get enough yodeling from musicians these days!

One song from Cabin Fever that Lund said he always has to be every show now – and I couldn’t quite tell if he was joking or actually tired of it – is the hilarious “Cows Around,” which is my wife Aprille’s favorite song of his and a performance that truly made her entire night. The song tells of the stubbornness of cattle and how cattle farming is sure to cost you a lot of money and drive you crazy. The most fun part of the song is when Lund rattles off all the different breeds of cow, which not only makes for a crazy fun sing-along but also a moment of agriculture education.

A major influence on Lund and his style of music was clearly Canadian folk hero Ian Tyson, who died in December of last year. Lund paid tribute to Tyson by covering his classic “M.C. Horses,” and also performing a new song he wrote in tribute to him called “El Viejo,” which will be the title track of his upcoming acoustic album set to be released in February of next year.

“El Viejo” was one of five songs off the upcoming album that Lund performed on Friday night. He performed a couple of gambling songs, “The Cardplayers” and “When the Game Gets Hot,” that will appear on the album, as well as potentially the first ever Mixed Martial Arts country song in “Out On a Win.”

During the band’s encore later in the evening, they would perform “Was Fort Worth Worth It?” as a spur-of-the-moment trial run because they hadn’t yet performed it live and were hoping to add it to the set on Saturday night for their Fort Worth concert.

Toward the end of his set, Lund would perform a song I’ve been fortunate to have seen it’s other co-writer Hayes Carll perform at least a couple of times in concert in “Bible on the Dash,” the two co-wrote it and it appeared on Cabin Fever.

Lund would finish his set out with a couple of fan-favorites in “Hair in My Eyes Like a Highland Steer,” the other cow song he exclaimed that he’s written, and “Rye Whiskey/Time to Switch to Whiskey.”

He would return for what would be a five-song encore, certainly one of the longest I’ve ever seen in concert, that began with him solo on the stage performing “S Lazy H,” off Things That Can’t Be Undone, a depressing tale of a generation’s owned family ranch that goes under because of changing times and greed.

The concert would culminate in a rocking performance of “Gettin’ Down on the Mountain,” the opening track from Cabin Fever, which perfectly showed off all of the amazing talent in the Hurtin’ Albertans band with Grant Siemens on electric guitar (and at times on steel guitar and mandolin), Sean Burns on bass (both electric and upright and at times on harmonica) and Brady Valgardson, who is the band’s drummer during the offseason from being an actual, by-God farmer.