The lessons of the road make poignant songwriting fodder. The highway’s combination of locomotion and seemingly boundless space offers a quiet interiority that other places cannot; with all that time and room, there’s little else to do but think. It’s as if the car window framing each vista were more mirror than postcard. This source of lasting revelations has inspired its own compendium of songs, from George Strait’s homeward-bound “Amarillo by Morning” to Miranda Lambert’s nomadic “Highway Vagabond.”
While Canadian singer-songwriter Colter Wall toured behind his 2017 self-titled debut, the road, as it often does, whispered thoughts of home—his native prairies, to be exact. Literally and figuratively between the steely metropolis of Toronto and the robust majesty of Vancouver, the Prairie Provinces of Alberta, Manitoba, and Wall’s native Saskatchewan are harder to define. Though Canada dwarfs the U.S. in landmass, the entire country has 3 million fewer people than California alone. Getting from town to town, from here to there, is a different kind of desolate, the beauty reinforced by a vast and varied emptiness.
Wall’s sophomore album, Songs of the Plains, uses the sounds of country icons like Waylon Jennings and George Jones as musical frames for the unfurled feel of those prairie stretches. Borrowing both the stylistic and storytelling genealogies of folk and traditional country, Wall extends a tip-of-the-hat to their golden fields. Two tracks portray the prairielands’ agrarian history through the eyes of the upstarts who settled that part of the country: “Saskatchewan in 1881” and the cover “Calgary Round-Up.” The latter focuses on Alberta’s famed Calgary Stampede, the annual rodeo and exhibition that dates to the city’s first agricultural fairs more than a century ago. Pedal steel and harmonica wind behind Wall’s husky baritone, winking at nostalgia but not giving over to it.
Songs of the Plains are the types of tales told around a crackling fire, those of homesickness (“Plain to See Plainsman”), blue-collar labor (“The Trains Are Gone”), and folk heroes writ large (“Wild Bill Hickok”). This is Wall’s attempt to put Canada more squarely into country’s storyline. He covers two cowboy traditionals, “Night Herding Song” and “Tying Knots in the Devil’s Tail,” singing the former almost entirely a cappella and shifting its original jaunt into something more somber, haunted. His yipping yodel resurfaces for his take on Billy Don Burns’ “Wild Dogs,” where it conjures the coyote’s howl.
Wall pushes in close against the untenanted space of the middle provinces, filling their geographic gaps with an intoxicating rasp. He sings with a serrated edge, his voice digging crevices rich with heartbreak, homeland, and heritage. “Sweetly taking his time/Drinking all the straight rye/Chasing it with red wine/Heavy on his troubled mind,” he offers on standout “Thinkin’ on a Woman,” the tale of a truck driver who finds little solace in the big-rig route that pulls him away from his paramour. Wall’s voice sustains every line’s third and fourth words, rattling the cage that holds the narrator back from what he wants. The driver’s frustration—targeted at himself, at circumstances binding him to this road—are palpable in Wall’s quavering breath.
Wall said recently that he appreciates atmospheric touches on songs, making his choice of producer Dave Cobb a natural fit. Cobb made Sturgill Simpson’s Metamodern Sounds in Country Music and Jason Isbell’s Southeastern, albums that succeeded in part on smart textural finishes. For “Night Herding Song,” Cobb made Wall sing into a microphone placed beside an actual campfire. During “The Trains Are Gone,” he underscores the absence of railroad work with a locomotive rhythm punctuated by the whistle-like echo of harmonica. Though the modern-day country of Cobb’s more famous collaborators seems indelibly bound to a certain stateside identity, Wall suggests an alternative: Sing the songs of the country you call home, even if it’s well beyond the 49th parallel.
