Corb Lund is a fast-rising star on the torch-and-twang scene, but don’t mistake him for a Nashville clone

Long and lanky, Corb Lund is sprawled across the couch at Universal Music Canada’s Vancouver HQ, discussing topics that range from SNFU to ancient computer technology to Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez to the land-bridge theory of human migration from Siberia to the Americas.

In an hour, he’ll cut over a few blocks to the JR Country building for an on-air interview about his new album, Losin’ Lately Gambler. Which might tell you all that you need to know about the fast-rising star of Canadian country, if you’re not familiar with the sophisticated-podunk nature of his music.

Lund and his band the Hurtin’ Albertans are in a very desirable position, having won over listeners who prefer their country not too far removed from Nashville’s one-dimensional commercial model. Recognized for his authentic voice and whip-smart writing skills, the former bassist of Edmonton’s Smalls is also considered hip among the kind of people who view Keith Urban as the Antichrist.

To put it another way, it’s not as if this year’s Canadian Country Music Award champ Johnny Reid is scoring Polaris Music Prize nominations, as Lund did with his 2007 album Horse Soldier! Horse Soldier!. Lund is a true crossover, like a male Kathleen Edwards, but with songwriting saturated in a vivid rural feel, humour, and a sense of history alien to most city slickers.

“I’m in a lucky position,” Lund begins. “I didn’t do it on purpose but somehow we seem to cross a lot of social barriers. I know that a lot of people who listen to straight country music come from Hicksville, but I grew up there too. My whole family are cowboys, for, like, a hundred years.”

This is precisely the source of Lund’s mojo. Like Horse Soldier! and the four records that preceded it, Lund’s Losin’ Lately Gambler—his first album for distinguished American roots label New West—is trad but sly. When he casually adds an extra syllable to the word penicillin to fit the metre of opening track “Horse Doctor, Come Quick”, the listener is reminded of wily vintage goofballs like Roger Miller and Jerry Reed.

“I fuckin’ loved Jerry Reed forever,” Lund announces, eyes blazing. “I like songs that have layers that reveal themselves. Those songs are fun and they make you smile, but then you listen closer and it’s actually pretty good, ”˜Oh, that’s what he means by that!’ Like ”˜Lord, Mr. Ford’.”

Or “The Truck Got Stuck”, for that matter, a well-known track from Lund’s 2005 album Hair in My Eyes Like a Highland Steer that plays like a novelty song until he slips a little commentary about genetically modified canola crops into the last verse. A similar impulse drives the wheezing, harmonium-led “This Is My Prairie”, from Losin’ Lately Gambler, wherein Lund takes the POV of a cattle rancher whose land is blighted by the encroaching oil industry.

“There are a lot of old-time rancher guys who you’d be surprised at how much they line up with environmentalists,” Lund offers. “If you have a piece of land in your family for a hundred years and it’s been native the whole time, you wanna keep it that way. But that song is a tricky one for me because, shit, my brother works on the rigs, and so do friends. And there’s a key verse in that song—it’s like the ”˜don’t blame the troops’ verse. You can’t blame the guys driving the trucks, it’s not their fault. It’s a confusing issue and we’re all facing it.”

Lund leans toward Sun Studio rockabilly on “Steer Rider’s Blues”, a song about his teenage years spent steer-riding in Taber, Alberta, and “The Only Long Rider I Know” is unalloyed country-rock. The breadth of the territory between the two songs suggests another square peg, Lund’s labelmate Dwight Yoakam, while the soft pad of the kick drum and phased guitar of “Chinook Wind” scream Waylon Jennings. Again, Lund seems delighted that somebody is talking his language.

“Yoakam. He’s never the huge superstar but he’s cooler than all the huge superstars and he’s always on the fringe,” he starts. “In the ’70s, that stuff was on the radio. Willie, Waylon, Kristofferson, Haggard. It was all good, and it wasn’t stuff you had to cringe about. What’s the big thing they all have in common? They all write their own shit, right? Today if you turn on country radio, there’s not a lot of them that are writing stuff on their own, and if they are, they’re not really writing it for themselves. There’s no art in it. Waylon is art. So’s Willie. There’s very little art in country music on the radio.”

With Losin’ Lately Gambler, a certain hurtin’ Albertan seems dead-set on fixing that.

Corb Lund plays the Commodore Ballroom on Thursday and Saturday (November 12 and 14).