Colter Wall

Colter Wall specializes in singing songs designed to stir up the ghosts of times long past. As he put it on his second album, he performs Songs of the Plains: cowboy songs, Western swing, and dusty ballads in the vein of Johnny Cash, with a voice that's craggy and subtly impassioned, and lyrics that tell tales of ordinary lives in the dusty Western territories. Wall first gained attention in his native Canada, and Songs of the Plains expanded his audience into the United States, a position he consolidated with 2020's Western Swing & Waltzes and Other Punchy Songs. 2023's Little Songs was his first major-label release, as his audience began to overlap with the country mainstream. Colter Wall was born and raised in Swift Current, Saskatchewan, in 1995. Wall first picked up the guitar when he was 12 years old, and by the time he was 13, he'd decided he wanted to make music his career. Initially, he played in local rock bands, but as he dug deeper into rock history, he developed an interest in the gritty, traditional sounds of blues and Appalachian country, and his ambitions moved from playing lead guitar to songwriting. In time, Wall shifted from playing with a rock band to solo gigs focusing on his country-accented material, and he struck up a friendship with the members of the Saskatchewan roots music outfit the Dead South, who took him on the road as their opening act. Producer Jason Plumb and the indie label Young Mary's Record Company were struck by Wall's talent as a performer and songwriter, and took him into the studio to cut an EP. Released in 2015, Imaginary Appalachia earned enthusiastic reviews on both sides of the Canadian/U.S. border, and earned him some influential friends, including Lucinda Williams (who invited Wall to open a show for her at Nashville's Ryman Auditorium), Rick Rubin (who signed him to a publishing deal), and Steve Earle (who said "Colter Wall is bar none the best young singer/songwriter I've seen in 20 years"). Wall's first full-length album, a self-titled effort, was released in March 2017; produced by Dave Cobb, it was recorded in RCA's famed Studio A in Nashville. Issued a year later, Wall's second Cobb-produced effort, Songs of the Plains, was a thematic collection of originals and a few choice covers honoring his Western Canadian heritage. 2020 brought another themed set in self-descriptive Western Swing & Waltzes and Other Punchy Songs, which also veered into cowboy territory. For Record Store Day 2021, Wall issued a live-in-the-studio LP recorded at Nashville's Sound Emporium with his road band, the Scary Prairie Boys. The limited-edition Live in Front of Nobody quickly sold out its vinyl pressing and became a valued collector's item. As songs like "Big Iron" and "Cowpoke" began racking up eight-figure plays on major streaming services and country radio showed interest in his tough, heartfelt music, Wall began attracting the attention of major record labels, and RCA struck a deal with the independent La Honda imprint to handle distribution of Wall's material. His first release under the RCA deal, Little Songs, was issued in July 2023, and confirmed that his success had not changed the hardscrabble eloquence of his music.
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