Under The Big Sky 2025: Canadian Country Crooner Corb Lund Descends on the Flathead Valley for a Doubleheader
The musician from Alberta is taking a break from his summer vacation to perform back-to-back shows Friday night
By Mike Kordenbrock
After a heavy touring schedule over the last few years, Corb Lund is spending this summer trying to catch up on his life.
For the alt-country singer-songwriter from Alberta, that means taking on fewer gigs and spending more time at his home just north of the U.S.-Canada border, where he’s been keeping busy writing songs (including some of the heavy metal variety) and taking on home improvement and construction projects on his property.
“We put out a record about eight months or a year ago, and I usually have to kind of tour like a maniac, and I don’t get much writing done because I’m kind of sick of it,” Lund said. “And then right about now, I start sort of naturally doing it. I don’t really have to force it. Usually as long as I take some time off and get the guitar in my hands, it sort of starts happening naturally.”
Lund’s not sure what he’ll do with the metal songs that have come from this period of songwriting, but he indicated that a side project down the road isn’t out of the question. And while writing metal music may seem to some like a departure from Lund’s country bonafides, the influence has actually been there all along.
Lund, who grew up on his family’s ranch about 5 miles across the border from Montana, started his professional music career playing in a metal band, which he did for most of his twenties. In a 2024 interview with the Irish music website “Lonesome Highway,” which is dedicated to hardcore country, Americana and roots music, Lund said that those early days might explain his writing style “to an extent.”
“The metal scene I was involved with was very fringe, indie, and underground, and the ethos of that scene was to find your own voice, be unique, and find your own style,” Lund said. “My songwriting was forged in that kind of furnace, and when I started writing Western and acoustic songs, I brought a certain element of quirkiness and contrariness to my writing. That was a result of being introduced to an independent and fringe music scene to begin with. So, all these years later, here I am writing strange cowboy songs.”
That pathway to producing those strange cowboy songs — his most recent original album features a country blues song about an old mixed martial arts fighter in the twilight of his career, and another about the woeful experience of taking too many edibles before a show — is a lengthy one. Lund said it’s not unheard of for him to take six months to finish a song, and he works on them in batches.
“I don’t sit down in an afternoon and write a song,” he said. “I sit down in an afternoon and I work on like 10 songs, a little bit on each one. It’s like you take it down from the shelf, polish it a little bit, and then put it back and work on the next one. I find it hard to make decisions in the moment on that kind of stuff. It takes me a while to know for sure what it is I’m trying to do.”
At the same time, Lund said that doing something other than music is good for his head. It’s a chance to forget about the thing that so often occupies his attention. This summer that means building a cabin and a shop.
“I’ve been touring my butt off with the guys since COVID lifted two-and-a-half years ago,” he said. “I barely can see straight.”
But Lund’s summer step back from performing isn’t a complete break, which explains why he’s taking a jaunt down to the Flathead this Friday to play at Under the Big Sky. And then, just a few hours later, Lund and his band will be taking the stage at The Great Northern Bar in Whitefish to play one of the music festival’s after-party shows.
Despite some of the recent tension between the United States and Canadian governments, stemming from President Donald Trump’s recurring threat of tariffs, and annexing Canada as a 51st state, Lund said that he’s kept coming down to the states and hasn’t noticed much of a difference in real life.
“I think he kind of caught us—all that stuff kind of caught us by surprise,” Lund said, adding that he feels like Albertans and Montanans can relate pretty well to begin with. “So I don’t really feel any weirdness or tension.”
Over the decades that Lund has been writing and performing music, Montana has figured prominently into his life, and he called it his favorite state. The Flathead Valley is a place he grew up visiting, and an area where he has long played.
His 2022 album “Songs My Friends Wrote,” features a cover of the Ian Tyson song “Montana Waltz,” which begins with the heartsick and lonesome lines “Northwest Montana can still make her cry, too many long nights without him, and when Charles M. Russell, gets to paintin’ the sky, she’s all alone in the shadows.”
His last record, “El Viejo,” was actually named in honor of Tyson, a revered Western singer and musician who died in 2022, and who Lund considered a close friend. The website Saving Country Music gave “El Viejo” high marks, and characterized its sensibility as a signal that Lund “seems content making music for himself and doing it his way as opposed to the hustle and grind.”
In a recent phone interview, Lund suggested that the album has withstood the experience of playing it live. There are times when playing a song live leads to the realization that it could have been arranged or written differently, he said.
“But this one’s holding up,” according to Lund.
He seems particularly proud too of the way in which “El Viejo” was produced with his band The Hurtin’ Albertans.
“We recorded it all acoustically,” he said. “There’s not a single electric lick on the whole record. We all just did it. There’s no doubling and layering. It’s just the four of us sitting in a room, all together. So it was really organic.”
Since the release of “El Viejo,” Lund has also been at work releasing some of his old albums on vinyl for the first time, or for the first time since their original vinyl run. For his debut 1995 album, “Modern Pain,” this is the first time it’s been issued on vinyl. His sophomore album, 1999’s “Unforgiving Mistress,” is being reissued on vinyl for the first time since the original pressing. He’s also re-recorded a couple songs from those old albums that he’s always loved, but feels have flown under the radar.
Coinciding with this vinyl project, Lund has played some shows where he and his band perform one of his old albums from start to finish.
“It’s almost like somebody else wrote them,” Lund said. “It’s like being your own cover band.”
He admitted that he was afraid to go back and listen to some of his old music in order to relearn it, but that it’s mostly ended up being an enjoyable experience.
“Some of the songs I wrote in the 90s. So it’s a long, long time ago. You’re a different person,” he said.
Lund described a naivete and innocence to some of the early tracks, and a simplicity, which has him thinking that he probably couldn’t write them now. “It’s been a really interesting journey.”
“Journey” is also the word he turns to in describing what he does with his song selection when it comes time to step on stage. Writing set lists ahead of time rarely feels right to him once the show gets going. Lund sees himself as “constructing a journey” onstage based on the atmosphere in the air. Sometimes people want to get rowdy, or mellow, or they want to hear stories. Or they just want to get drunk.
“I find that my sensibility is much better in the moment than it is trying to predict three hours out,” he said. “And we have enough—we have 10 records of material. So we have a lot of different avenues we can go down.”
Corb Lund will be playing Friday, July 18 at Under The Big Sky from 6 p.m. to 7 p.m. on the Great Northern Stage. Later that night, he will perform at a festival after party at the Great Northern Bar in Whitefish with Miller Campbell. Doors for the sold-out show open at 9 p.m.