Hayes Carll and Corb Lund hadn’t played a concert together since 2018, but they came to the Bijou Theater in Knoxville, Tennessee for their “Bible on the Dash” tour, which was simply a set of swapping songs, telling stories and good vibes. “I met Corb at a poker game in Dauphin, Manitoba,” Carll said. “It was probably 20 years ago. We quickly became best friends and would go and trade tours with each other. He would bring me up to Canada and then I would have him come down to Texas or in the States. We collaborated on a number of songs over the years.”
Around 40 minutes into the show, Carll got up from his chair, saying, “I’m a little tired, so I’m gonna take a break and we’ll have Corb play for a while,” and walked off the stage guitar in hand, leaving Lund to entertain the audience with his brand of folksy Americana. Lund is a Canadian raconteur, a prairie poet who is a generally funny and charismatic singer/songwriter that can go toe-to-toe with the best storytelling musicians such as Todd Snider or Loudon Wainwright III. And he carries some cowboy cred. If Ryan Bingham hadn’t already been cast in “Yellowstone,” Lund would have been a great fit in the Dutton ranch bunkhouse.
For his part, Carll is certainly no slouch either. If the call went out for the stereotypical guy sitting in a rocker on the back porch spinning yarns, he would be your man. The two musicians had an easy conviviality to their back and forth, the banter never sounding forced or having a hint of one-upmanship. Right away, Carll informed the audience this was only the second night of their tour, and when the applause faded away, added, “I only say this to lower expectations.”
This would be all well and good but not worth the time if the songs were weak, and weak they most definitely were not. Carll brought his best material as did Lund, and both musicians also brought their A-games. For 90 minutes it all felt intimate and relaxing but energetic as well.
Lund got the show underway on an ominous tone with a dark song about suicide, ‘The One Left in the Chamber’. He was writing songs in a middle-of-nowhere cabin and, “After being out there by myself for a few weeks, you start to feel a little snicky,” Carll took over to play ‘You Get It All’ from the album of the same name. It’s a sparse country ballad about the challenges and rewards of a life devoted to one person, “from the chapel to the hearse / you get it all”.
Lund is from Alberta province North of Montana where people need to be self-sufficient. “You have to have all kind of skills when you’re out there ranching,” he said, prompting Carll to add, “He even makes his own ammunition.” Lund agreed that was so, and introduced his next song as “kind of an end to civilisation sort of song. It’s a canned food and guns and ammo rocker” and struck the first chord to ‘Getting’ Down on the Mountain’ from his excellent “Cabin Fever” album.
‘Nice Things,’ was next, also off Carll’s “You Get It All” album, and is one of his finest compositions where God is a woman who comes down to Earth to check out her creation and meets with the kind of situations humans face regularly.
The two played their first duet on Carll’s ‘Little Rock,’ trading verses as his disillusioned character travels from place to place seeking something more meaningful in life before coming to the conclusion he may as well “make it back to Little Rock” because whatever he’s looking for isn’t out there. Carll was from Houston and when it came time to go off to college, he was looking at a school in Arkansas. “It was in a dry county,” he recalled. “They didn’t put that in the brochure. But it got kind of close to the deadline, and I had to make a decision. The school did have a radio station and a hacky-sack club. That looked good to me.”
Anyway, he met another student who was into reggae and had long dreads, which somehow turned blue because of a dye in the bed sheets. “There was an opening in a time slot on the radio station,” Carll continued, “so we wound up with a show called The Rasta and the Redneck.” After a bit of give and take about Lund cleaning fish he caught while Carll wrote a song, Carll then introduced a song intended for a new album coming out in August (2025) called ‘The Progress of Man.’ It’s his typical social conscience with a twist tune and starts off like this: “Man on TV he’s making strange faces/ folks flying rockets to faraway places / The world’s getting turned on by assholes and racists / It’s all for the progress of man.”
Carll’s songs have a country simplicity that can sometimes hide the social conscience and sharp humour that runs through them. Lund’s songs are peopled by interesting characters that put a smile on your face hearing of their escapades, or you may recoil in horror at some unfortunate turn of events. But whatever they played, it was all good, infectiously funny and full of momentum that lasted through the evening. The mutual respect was on display for all to see.
“I’ve always been drawn to Corb’s writing,” Carll said. “He writes passionately about the things that are important to him — the western culture, the rodeo culture, the cowboy culture, all of that. I think he’s one of the best when it comes to writing about life, and he happens to have an interesting life. He’s also a really clever wordsmith and is funny, which I appreciate, as well. He doesn’t take himself too seriously. I think he takes his work seriously, but not himself.”
Lund graduated from an Alberta band called the Smalls to becoming a heck of a musician. He, not Neil Young, is Canada’s true outlaw country singer, and he’s got the raucous following to prove it. He told the audience he considered Carll to be one of the musicians he looks up to. But where Carll has that laid back style, Lund is more up front and personal, although both have a healthy strain of self-deprecation running through their bloodstreams. Much of the evening’s magic came from the spontaneous interplay you can only get from two friends with mutual respect for what they do.
Lund admits to not doing well with co-writers except for Carll and a friend of theirs, Jaida Dreyer. “She’s got a lot of irons in the fire,” he said, “writing a bunch of hits for Luke Bryan and those country people. And she’s also quite successful in the multi-hundred thousand dollar show horse world. Anyway we wrote this one together, kind of George Strait meets the Texas Tornados.” ‘Was Fort Worth Worth It?” is one of those guy and a girl and horses tunes (Did the Stockyards turn us into somethin’ / to where we should be ashamed?) that sticks to you for days like one of their other classics, ‘Horse Poor.’
As you might expect, each time one song ended there were random song titles being shouted out from the audience. Carll had thought about adding a request portion, or so he said, but decided against it. “The silver lining about being on the fringes of the music business like we are,” he allowed, “is we don’t get recognised at Home Depot, which is nice, but we can also play whatever we want and not be in a box on the radio. I don’t do this a whole lot, but I’m going to play that one I heard someone ask for, loudly. I want to preface it with a quote from my friend Ray Wylie (Hubbard). I wanted to play him this song because he has one called ‘Redneck Mother’ which in many ways served him well. But it has been attached to him for the rest of his life, and people expect to hear it at shows. So, I played this one for him and he looked at me and said, ‘Hayes, the problem with irony is not everybody gets it.’ I found that to be true.” The song attached to Carll forever is ‘She Left Me for Jesus,’ and it’s chorus is ripe for sing-alongs.
One of the priceless stories Lund told had to do with the fine Knoxville musician, Scott Miller. “Scott made me appreciate how big a deal Tennessee football is (Go Vols!). He wears UT socks at gigs and shows them to the audience on game days. One time we were down in Texas in the early aughts, and the Texas music scene was kinda at war with the Nashville scene. Those people just thought Nashville was all of Tennessee, so when Scott gets up on stage and says “Hi, I’m from Tennessee”, people booed.” Lund paused for a moment and then said, “I’m gonna curse here just for emphasis of the story. Scott looks at ‘em and goes “Fuck, y’all! If it weren’t for San Houston, you motherfuckers would be speaking Spanish.” (Sam Houston, commander of the Texan army that helped win Texas’ independence, is from Maryville, Tennessee, friends.) “That was one of my all-time favourite moments,” Lund said, beaming.
Of course, the last song of the evening was the title song to the tour. Lund said he’d been working on the song for six years and still hadn’t finished it, so he took it to Carll and it was done in a half hour. It’s another one of those “irony” songs Carll spoke of earlier about motorists putting a bible on the dashboard as a way of appearing righteous church-going people should they get pulled over by the police. Leaving the Bijou after the show, I looked at the huge tour bus parked outside and couldn’t resist taking a peek to see if there was a bible on the dash.
Great review of two of my favourite singer/songwriters. Unfortunately they rarely come across the pond anymore