Album Review – Red Shahan’s “Hard Land”

Texas country (#550.3), Country Rock (#560), (neo) Western (#512) on the Country DDS.

There’s no need to close your eyes and suspend disbelief, or stoke the imagination with intoxicants or potions to be transported to the West Texas universe where the songs of Red Shahan dwell among the sandpaper winds, scrub vegetation, red skies, and creeping things. You feel the sun blazing down on your skin and the grit in your pores as soon as the first note cracks the dull silence. You hear the earth gasping out for rain and relief. It all feels as rough and wild and the mange on a coyote, but with an unshakable beauty brought forth by the only victory to score in this unforgiving place: to endure to the next day.

It’s no coincidence that the music of Red Shahan has populated the universe of pioneering neo Western filmmaker and television producer Taylor Sheridan with the way Red evokes geography in the mind’s eye so effortlessly, and that Sheridan has drawn inspiration from Shahan’s music, and maybe a little vice versa as well. Sheridan actually co-wrote one of Shahan’s new song called “Ghosts of the Panhandle Wind,” while the first song we heard from Shahan’s new album Hard Land was the wicked and reverberative “Cotton Fire” when it emerged at the most opportune time during a scene on the Sheridan series Landman.

“Cotton Fire” is everything you want from a Red Shahan song: attitude, intrigue, story, strong characters, all placed in a hostile setting. “A farmer grows back taller when you cut him at the knees” is the kind of line you come to the well of Red Shahan to drink from, while the country rock tones rattles your molars, and Red’s voice sounds like it’s run through the same dusty filter as the horizon of the West Texas sun that paints the landscape in blood every evening.

As much as “Cotton Fire” works as the perfect epitaph to Red Shahan’s fifth record, “Welcome To Country Hell” is the perfect introduction. Take all those idyllic portrayals of rural life that the pretty boys back east in Nashville love to prattle on about, and place them under foot. This song is the authentic representation of those living in forgotten America, with the resonator guitar bringing out the blues and blood of the story. Generational trauma, drug addiction, and a bleak to impossible outlook through cracked and grime-caked windows is the real experience of so many left in the hallowed out husk of middle America, etched in stark relief in this blistering opening tune by Shahan.

You would be just fine if these quintessential Red Shahan songs that bookend the new album were fleshed out in-between with similar sentiments and treatments. But that’s not exactly how Hard Land transpires. The album’s second song “Runaway” offers some relief, if only sonically with it’s comparatively dulcet, Tom Petty-esque tones and appealing melody, even if the song itself is still is about a restless spirit. From a musical standpoint, some of these songs could live in the universe of fellow Texas country artists like Randy Rogers or Wade Bowen, opening up the Red Shahan experience to listeners beyond the ones who want to finish a record with a twisted heart and a bloody nose.

Yet even when the sounds turn a bit more sweet, Red Shahan is still going to do Red Shahan, which is to dig up those hardscrabble stories like the till blade when it breaks the crust of the dry land in hopes a seed will find some nourishment in the dark soil below. The song “Hard Land” is a reminder that even as hard as it is out on the open plains trying to get the soil to turn into pay dirt, the city can be so much worse, especially for country folks.

And the Taylor Sheridan co-write on the album isn’t just returning the favor for all that maibox money coming in from sync licensing for songs placed in the TV universe. The coyote howls of “Ghosts of the Panhandle Wind” make it hard to not start barking along yourself, making for one of the most infectious moments of the record. The moments of Hard Land are so much less about country and Western cosplay, and more about making the plight of the blue collar and agrarian, dry land dweller present in the mind of the listener.

Hard Country is also just one of those great listening records, especially when you settle in with it. You come for the worn, cracked, and rusty beauty of an old barn slowly melting back into the rugged earth, but you stick around to unravel the mystery within the lyrics and explore the interesting and involved characters. You think you have it hard? Wait until you get an earful of Hard Land. It will make your life sound easy. And if it sounds like an autobiography, well then, it will make you proud.

8.3/10

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