Corb Lund didn’t need anything more than his personality, his guitar and his songs to captivate a full room at the Quesnel and District Seniors’ Centre last week.
Lund brought his “B.S. With C.L.” solo acoustic tour to Quesnel on Nov. 9, and for about two hours, he had a crowd, which spanned all ages, listening intently, clapping, singing along and laughing as he sang a mix old and new songs and shared stories about many of those tunes.
I’ve seen Lund perform with a full band a couple of times, and he was great each time, but as a music lover who particularly loves the storytelling aspect of roots and country music, I loved seeing him going solo.
With this show, he had a chance to share longer introductions to his songs, and we, as audience members, had a chance to really hear his lyrics. The whole night was a two-hour reminder for me of what a great songwriter Lund is.
There was lots of singing along and clapping to his more well-known songs like The Truck Got Stuck and Time to Switch to Whiskey.
He seemed to be having a lot of fun getting the audience going with those songs, but Lund was also able to elicit a hushed silence from the crowd with more serious songs like Sadr City and S Lazy H.
I think it shows a lot of depth when an artist can do both in one night – especially on his own like that.
Lund, who joked that he’s found a very small niche market for his music that he calls “agriculture tragic” or “ag-trag,” played two sets and an encore, and with nine studio albums, he had so much great material to choose from.
Over the course of the night, he did a great job of spanning his career. He shared a new song about being “horse poor,” well-known songs like I Wanna Be In The Cavalry and songs that audience members requested, such as Good Copenhagen.
However, this tour isn’t just about songs – stories play a big part in what is being billed as “an evening of western conversation, songs and stories,” and Lund is a funny and personable storyteller that you want to keep listening to.
One more serious and touching story he shared was letting us know about his friend Jason Podloski, who was one of three people who died following an ammonia leak at the Fernie Memorial Arena on Oct. 17.
Podloski was a good friend of Lund’s, and he built the acoustic guitar that he is playing on this tour. Lund spoke fondly of his friend before singing The Rodeo’s Over, a song that one fan requested that fit the moment perfectly.
There was a lot of humour, too, as Lund told us about the Ego Brothers, a less-serious band he is in with Texas songwriters Hayes Carll and John Evans. They sing songs about how great they are and how they can’t keep the ladies away, and we got to hear two of them.
That mix of humourous and serious is a big reason why I like Lund. He’s comfortable singing about trucks, horses and cows as he is singing about war and losing the family ranch.
I came into this show as a Corb Lund fan, but I left as an even bigger fan and appreciating his songwriting even more.