Colter Wall Honors His Western Roots on Songs of the Plains

Don't call rising Canadian country phenom Colter Wall a cowboy. To me it's kind of a sacred title, he says. But he's a lot closer to it than many of today's country singers. He grew up in cowboy country, steeped in the lifestyle's lore, and he's even a cattle owner. Still, he maintains, I think you can only call yourself a cowboy if that's your full-time occupation.

For the last few years, Wall's been too busy touring to devote his full attention to anything else, but he was compelled to fill his second album, Songs of the Plains, with cowboy tales. The closest anybody in Nashville ever comes to tales of the trails is singing about rodeos and barbecues, and Wall is weary of it. The public awareness of that whole element of country music history has been kind of muddled, he says, and people just aren't as aware of it as they used to be. I was talking to somebody the other day and explaining why Stetson hats and cowboy boots and pearl snap shirts are called Western wear I had to explain that.

Nobody ever needed to explain western wear to Wall, who was raised in Swift Current, Saskatchewan. It's predominantly cattle country, he explains. My last full time gig I had before I started playing music for a living was working cows with my cousin on a thousand-head cattle ranch.

But the man who pledges allegiance to the sounds of the saddle started out as a hard rocker. The first songs I learned to play were all Sabbath and Zeppelin and AC/DC, reports Wall. Country music was what the folks listened to, so as a 13 year old, it was like, Wow, that's lame, I want to learn rock n' roll. Eventually he came full circle, tracing classic rock's influences back to the blues, and finding his way from there to folk and old-school country.

In 2015, just a few weeks shy of his 20th birthday, the precocious Wall released his debut EP, Imaginary Appalachia. It showcased his spartan folk/country style, based around his own acoustic guitar picking and his old-fashioned voice. Blessed with a burly, bottomless baritone that could easily belong to someone decades older, Wall came across from the start as an old soul inhabiting the body of a millennial. Once the EP's opening track, Sleeping on the Blacktop, was featured in the Oscar-winning film Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, Wall began blowing up.

Wall's praises were emphatically sung by Steve Earle and Rick Rubin. The latter became so enamored with Wall's work that he signed him to a publishing deal. Even now, Wall seems stunned by it. Traveling to L.A. and meeting him was very surreal, he remembers of his initial Rubin encounter. I brought my guitar and played him some songs I was working on at the time, and he sat there with his legs folded in the middle of the floor, closed his eyes and listened.

Photo credit: Little Jack Films

LINK:	https://newsroom.spotify.com/2018-11-27/colter-wall-honors-his-western...
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