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Welcome to “Cloverdale In Conversation.” This month, Corb Lund is our guest. The Alberta musician headlines the CR Main Stage on Sunday Night (May 18) at the 2025 Cloverdale Rodeo and Country Fair.
Lund recently wrapped up tours to both Europe—with The Dead South—and the east coast of the U.S.—with Hayes Carll—promoting his album El Viejo (2024). The title track was written about legendary Canadian country music icon Ian Tyson. A friend of Lund, Tyson passed away a few years ago.
Lund took some of his post-tour time to chat about El Viejo, touring, the musical process, and rodeo.
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Malin Jordan: Let’s start off with a little bit about yourself. Where were you born, where you grew up, that type of thing?
Corb Lund: I grew up in southern Alberta on the family farm—and we have a ranch too that we’ve had since 1902. I grew up outside of Taber and our ranch is near Cardston. It’s actually about four or five miles north of the Montana border. We’re right by Waterton National Park, or North of Glacier Park in Montana.
My family were ranchers and rodeo-cowboy people. So, I grew up that way. And when I was about 17, I got into rock ‚n‘ roll music. I was in a heavy band for 10 years called The Smalls and I’ve been making Western music for 25 years. Or something like that.
MJ: I saw you reunited (with The Smalls) in 2014 and did the “Slight Return Tour.” How did that go?
CL: That was fun. Yeah, it was lots of fun. I think it had been 11 or 12 years since The Smalls retired and we got together for a tour. It was really fun. That was a while back.
MJ: What was the impetus behind getting back together and doing that tour? What sparked it?
CL: Just fun, mostly. Just seemed like it would be a good time. And it was.
MJ: How did you get into music?
CL: Well, when I was a kid, I was listening to my parents‘ music, which was Marty Robbins Gunfighter Ballads and Johnny Horton military history songs and Kenny Rogers story songs and stuff like that. So, I don’t know. That was the first stuff I really liked. It was actually stuff like Black Sabbath that made me pick up a guitar. And Motorhead and that kind of thing. But shortly after that, I figured out I could play all those old Western songs I grew up with. So I kind of did them both for a long time.
MJ: You seem to weave the history of country music into some of the tracks you write today. What is that process like, do you intentionally draw on that stuff or do you just kind of feel it? Is it innate?
CL: I definitely steal a lot from the old old boys, yep. There’s a lot of retro, old-fashioned stuff in my music and I blend it all together in a big stew. I borrow from cowboy ballads and from blues and from honky-tonk and from ’70s country and folk and all kinds of stuff. I like all that old stuff: Western swing, bluegrass a little bit, a little bit of jazz. I like to mix it all up together for sure. Rockabilly for sure.
MJ: What was the process like for Counterfeit Blues? Because those tracks were jazzed up versions of older songs.
CL: Those are just basically live versions of all of our stuff that we played live off our first few records. Because a friend of ours, he wanted to film a documentary of a band recording live in Sun Studios in Memphis. Sun Studios is where Elvis and Johnny Cash and everybody recorded back in the day. So we went down there and we only had two days, or two nights actually, in the studio after the tourists had gone home. We basically just played those songs live off the floor just like we’ve been playing them live at shows.
MJ: And you got an album out of it.
CL: Yeah, we didn’t mean to. It was for a documentary, but it turned out so well that we made a record out of it. But yeah, I like those versions too. They’re kind of raw.
MJ: How was the latest tour? And that’s the new album you were promoting?
CL: Yeah, it was El Viejo. It’s Spanish for “the old man.” It’s a reference to our friend Ian Tyson who passed away. He was a Western songwriter, a cowboy songwriter.
MJ: You did some shows with Ian Tyson several years ago. [Including one at the Vogue in 2018.]
CL: Yeah, he was a good friend. He passed away a couple of years ago [in 2022].
But, yeah,the tour was great. It was long, but it was great. I’ve been touring for two years—ever since COVID lifted, basically. In March, I was in the UK opening for The Dead South. We were playing in England, Ireland, Northern Ireland, and Scotland. And I was just on a month-long tour of the Eastern U.S. with a friend of mine from Texas named Hayes Carll. That was fun too. We did like a duo-acoustic show.
MJ: Were you playing mostly songs from the new record or a good mix?
CL: A good mix, yeah. Played a few new ones, few old ones.
MJ: So what can fans here expect when you come through for the show? Is it going to be a little bit of that too?
CL: Yeah, at a show like that we’ll play a lot of cowboy songs, a lot of the rowdy stuff. Sounds like it’ll be a drinking party show, you know? We don’t use a set list anymore. We have 10 records worth of material and we don’t use a set list. We just kind of wing it based on how the audience is feeling. So, it should be really fun. I plan to make it a pretty up-tempo, pretty energetic set in Cloverdale.
My family has a lot of history with Cloverdale—with the rodeo. My uncles and my dad all competed there. My uncle won the bulldog [steer wrestling] in the ’80s there … That’s where you jump off the galloping horse and wrestle a steer. My dad did that. My uncle did that. And a bunch of my uncles rodeoed there. And my cousins. My uncle’s name is Tom Ivins. My dad, DC Lund competed there [steer wrestling]. So did my uncle Lynn Jensen. Lynn Jensen was a bareback bronc rider. And I’ve got a bunch of uncles and cousins that still compete to this day actually in professional rodeo.
MJ: So your life has been influenced by Western themes: ranching, rodeo, horses, that whole kind of thing.
CL: Yeah, both sides of my family came to Alberta around the turn of the century and they’ve been ranching here ever since. They were raising cows in Utah and Nevada before that. So, yeah, it goes way back for me. I identify with my culture very much. That’s who I am.
MJ: I guess you have a big fan base in the U.S. Southwest too. You seem to tour there a lot.
CL: We tour all over the States, but the cowboy states like us a lot. They understand what we’re singing about. Culturally, in some ways, the cowboy stuff resonates better north-south than it does east-west because the cowboy culture is similar all the way from Alberta down to Texas. Arizona’s got a lot of cowboys and so does Montana, so does Idaho, so does Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma.
MJ: So you have a rodeo connection with Cloverdale. Have you ever been here?
CL: No, I haven’t ever been. I’ve been wanting to play there for years and finally it’s happening, so I’m excited.
MJ: So, what’s next for you? Do you have another album in the works? Are you going to tour some more?
CL: No, I’m staying home for most of the rest of the year. I’ve been touring harder than I’ve ever toured since COVID lifted. And I’m fried. So Cloverdale is my last show for quite a while. I’m doing a few weekend things through the summer, but for the most part I’m home for most of the rest of the year, thankfully.
MJ: You like to tour. So how was COVID? That must have been pretty hard.
CL: Yeah, it kind of was. In some ways it was good. I’ve been touring my butt off pretty much since high school. So, it was nice to have two years off, in a way. It made me kind of fall in love with music again because it kind of took me out of the grind for a while. And I wrote the new record El Viejo.
MJ: Anything you want to add?
CL: Just that I’m excited to be coming to Cloverdale. I’ve been waiting to play at the rodeo for years. So glad it’s finally happening.
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Juno Award winner Corb Lund headlines the CR Main Stage Sunday (May 18) at the rodeo and fair. No separate ticket is needed to see Lund. The CR Main Stage is included with a Cloverdale Fairgrounds admission ticket.
For Fairgrounds admission tickets, or more info on the 77th Cloverdale Rodeo and the 134th Country Fair, visit cloverdalerodeo.com.
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Malin Jordan
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