WH: Are you working on songs for a new album? If so, what is the theme of the album and when can fans expect a release?
RB: Right now I’m working on a live album. We’ve recorded shows from all across the country and also Europe and Australia. [It is now available for pre-order with an October 21 release to follow].
WH: How has fatherhood changed your worldview?
RB: It’s made me think a bit further down the line, but I don’t think it’s made me any more or less aware of what’s going on.
WH: What music are you listening to these days?
RB: I’ve been listening to a lot of classic country music. Ray Price, Johnny Bush, and Gary Stewart, just to name a few.
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A friend of mine who grew up in Lubbock, Texas recalls meeting Ryan Bingham in his early days when he still had one foot in the rodeo circuit. He came to College Station, Texas for a show and crashed at her house offering up an album he claimed to have recorded in his bathroom. This was prior to his debut studio album, Wishbone Saloon. At that time, he was mostly playing cowboy songs.
Ryan’s vagabond lifestyle seems to have changed into a demanding touring schedule since his 2010 success winning the Oscar in the category of “Best Original Song,” and a string of hit albums beginning with Mescalito in 2007. He is now based out of Los Angeles where he lives with his wife, Anna Axster and their young child. With the support of millions of fans, he has certainly succeeded beyond his early vocation as a bull-riding teenager, caravanning with cowboy friends around the American Southwest and sleeping where he fell.
Even in the midst of his rise to fame, adversity loomed over Bingham. He lost both of his parents in the time leading up to his 2012 release, Tomorrowland. He wrote about them in a song on that album called “Never Far Behind.”
By most accounts, Ryan Bingham shies away from the lime-light of fame, yet he seems to be the same laid-back, take-it-as-it-comes dude he was when he first started writing music who would come to be praised by greats such as the late Guy Clark and Robert Earl Keen.
“Americana” has become a fancy way to describe what used to be called “Country & Western,” except it is a genre mostly consisting of artists who are young enough to have grown up listening to Nirvana—in the nineties—when 50% of all music fell, arbitrarily categorized, under the wide swath of “Alternative Music.” Nevertheless, I think Americana describes Bingham’s music well. At our finest, Americans are a people who are able to maintain our composure through creative and artistic expression in times of sorrow and success, during war and peace alike. In the musician’s own words:
“I never let this world get too heavy on my shoulders, ‘Cause my diamond always will pull the weight that I’m under.” –Ryan Bingham from “My Diamond is Too Rough”
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Warren Hines is a writer based in the Mississippi Delta. You can read more of his work here.
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