Music Monday: Colter Wall, A Different Side of Country Music

In a world filled with country music that all sounds like a remake and carries remarkably similar lyrics, Colter Wall offers listeners a chance to hear a story from deep in the trenches of love, hate, hard work, or somewhere in between. Wall’s sound is often described as gitty, rough, and authentic, but his music gives the soul of everyday troubles a voice, including those in the western world and outside.

Wall, who was born and raised, and now resides in Canada, where he ranches and raises cattle, contains a voice you might not equate to his frame or age. Nevertheless, he lets loose a rough baritone that sits heavy on your soul and lends much credibility to the tough topics his songs cover. Wall brings to mind other storytellers of the past like Eddy Arnold, Charley Pride, and Marty Robbins with his lyrics, but he takes it deeper and touches on topics such as drinking, driving drunk, and the heartbreak of old cowboys forced to hang up their spurs. His sound brings to mind a young Johnny Cash. His lyrics are deep, dark, and full of life experiences, similar to Cash’s last studio album American IV: The Man Comes Around.

It’s one thing to like an artist for his sound, lyrics, and songs, but it’s a whole other thing to feel like he might be someone you’d like to hang out with. Colter Wall scheduled a tour for the fall of 2021, thinking the world would be back to normal. As the story goes, that wasn’t the case, so many of Wall’s stops were canceled, and he made the process of refunding a simple, honest event. During that complicated time, he decided to refund tickets because, as he said,

“This is everyone’s hard-earned money,” and he didn’t feel right holding onto it in hopes of rescheduling. The highlighted quote on his website says, “These songs are punchier than I am,” somehow making him even more likable.

Recently, his song “Sleeping on the Blacktop” was featured in the introduction to Yellowstone. Following the highlight, the song gained a #12 spot on the iTunes all-genre songs chart right between Adele and Bruno Mars, while the album “Sleeping on the Blacktop” from 2015’s Imaginary Appalachia was at #33 on the all-genre albums chart. This young man might not fall under superstar status yet, but he’s already created songs that are history makers, and with a voice like his, Wall is hard to forget.