Listening to the newest album from local country musician Chris Guenther, you can hear the sun shining down onto a dusty landscape and a rogue’s gallery of train robbers, horse thieves and weary lawmen as they navigate a long-forgotten American West.
Guenther’s eighth studio album, “American Outlaw: Volume II,” was released on Wednesday. It’s available on all major streaming services (Spotify, Apply Music, etc.) as well as in CD format at Guenther’s many in-person shows.
The album is a great listen, especially if you’re a fan of western music and creative storytelling about outlaws, gangsters, brigands and border towns.
The production value is high, with well-played layers of guitar, keyboard, banjo, harmonica, dobro, fiddle and rich vocal harmonies.
The opening track, “The Brave Line,” is a instrumental number that pays homage to the spooky sounds of the old spaghetti westerns. The album’s ballads are also balanced with a few spoken word numbers, a kind of cowboy poetry over a compelling sonic backdrop.
“The Life & Death of Elmer McCurdy” tells the story of a train robber who was executed and his body put on display, passed around the country until its story was forgotten. The corpse was rediscovered in the background of a scene of “The $6 Million Man” television show filmed in California. Guenther describes McCurdy as someone who did most of his living after his death, traveling the country while the west disappeared.
The poem “Tom Horn’s Epilogue” takes us inside the final moments of a supposed assassin — who was perhaps just a patsy framed and caught up in the middle of a land war — who speaks to us from the gallows. Even if he was executed unfairly, Guenther’s somber voice offers a chilling note of how his life and death would be remembered: “in the service of justice, a killer condemned.”
In an album full of outlaws, even an homage to the lawmen is called “Texas Devils,” telling the story of rough purveyors of frontier justice:
“South of Nueces and north of the Rio Grande.
Shoot straight at your aiming don’t walk up on a wounded man.
There won’t be no coroner, we’ll leave them to die in the sand.
It’s Texican justice in the middle of an ungodly land.”
Guenther, 42, who studied history and teaching, now works as an agriculture, welding and biology instructor at W.F. West High School in Chehalis. He continues to devote much of his spare time to writing and making music.
He traveled the country last year to visit the spots that he wrote about in this album — ghost towns in Montana, the home of the Sundance Kid in Wyoming, the border country of Texas.
Music-making is a family project for the Guenthers. His mother, Melody, still plays drums with him at some of his shows. His high-school-age son Elias Morris also joins him on stage (and played both accordion and mandolin on the most recent album). Elias also is in a duet with his middle-school-aged sister.
When I spoke with Guenther last weekend, he and his son had been working on songwriting techniques earlier that day.
“I was showing him the craft a little bit,” Guenther said.
I asked how he got into writing a series of albums telling true-to-life old West stories. He said it was a bucket list goal of his, and so one day he read a Cowboys and Indians magazine list of the 10 most notorious outlaws. He tried to find one he could relate to, but couldn’t find much common ground until he read about the last one, Sam Bass, a train robber and gang leader.
“He was a normal guy, had never crossed the line as far as illegal conduct of any kind, but somehow he went from good to bad,” Guenther said. “You wonder how many times he had the chance to turn back and not venture down that pathway. We’re all mortal. It intrigued me.”
He tried turning it into a three-minute song, then wondered if he could do it again — capturing just the key moments of a notorious life while hinting at the full story of who they are and what they became.
Some songs took years to pull together.
“You write it, leave it be, come back and rewrite it,” Guenther said. “These songs get 20 rewrites before they’re done.”
Guenther plans to continue writing, performing and innovating his own style of independent honky-tonk and western music.
“To be pigeonholed into just one genre, that’s never been my interest,” he said. “I’m free to go make whatever music I feel like. That’s the outlaw in myself, the ability to do whatever the heck I want whenever I want to do it.”
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In related news, Guenther is holding a 25th anniversary reunion show for all the members who have ever played in his band, the Honky Tonk Drifters. The show with live music and dancing will be Saturday, April 22, at 7 p.m. at the Grant Hodge VFW hall, 111 W. Main St., Centralia. It’s open to the public with $10 entry.
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Brian Mittge can be reached at brianmittge@hotmail.com.
