The most noticeable aspect of Ryan Bingham’s detour toward the small screen, no doubt partially due to his pairing with television auteur Taylor Sheridan, was hearing how much focus and direction he came back into the studio with. But the songwriter’s purpose feels more authorial than it did even five years ago. You can hear his attention drift just out of frame and linger on ideas that give a landscape view or a fisheye lens look at the cowboy lifestyle, without ever going too deeply into the story’s veins. He even pokes fun at getting too autobiographical on “Relevance.” He quips that he could croak and croon about his ex-wife, or his troubadour lifestyle, or month-long benders that span a whole hemisphere. But he knows none of it will matter if he doesn’t have conviction, asking, “What’s the relevance if you can’t get any love?” He seems to know that the story stays true no matter who tells it, but it’s his job to set the scene.
You could call his ninth studio album a return to his roots, but it might be a better analysis to say that Bingham’s They Call Us The Lucky Ones is just him re-adjusting the atmosphere. The singer-songwriter has always thrived on the outskirts, and that’s true of his placement within his own stories, too. Bingham never really takes on the protagonist role of a song so much as his stretched-thin vocal cords seem to wrap around a big idea, like a narrator of a high-concept story. “I stand in the middle of a river deep and wide,” he mutters on “The Ones,” a track that turns over dirt like the opening credits to a neo-western. Later on, he’ll admit that he “can’t recall where he may have gone,” on “Twist the Knife.” But it’s a blessing when Bingham gets lost in his own world, and his willingness to be a vessel toward those bigger themes only amplifies that.
Confidence in his placement in the world is a big theme of Bingham’s newest, only highlighted by his studio backing band in The Texas Gentleman this go-around. It’s a testament to both parties that a one-off show at Billy Bob’s in Fort Worth could manifest itself into a ten-track clinic as high-powered as this one, but the accents and detours make Bingham feel back in his own skin for the first time in years. From raucous, roaring juke jams like “Let The Big Dog Eat” down to the most siloed soliloquies of love on “Blue Skies,” there’s never a mode that feels too uncomfortable for either party, despite how far the two seem to push and pull between barroom skillsets and solemn songwriter affinities.
It’s a space that allows the now 45-year-old to take some jabs at his own sense of self. Far from the more reserved, self-serious roaming cowboy that records as Mescalito and Junky Star cultivated, They Call Us The Lucky Ones finds a little breathing room in his typically dust-and-dirt-laden landscape sound. “I got a feeling that this party’s just about to begin,” he roars on the album’s aptly titled third track that reads like a self-prescribed second wind in its subtext. Moments like these make Bingham seem freer to pluck from more tongue-in-cheek influences, with a dash of Terry Allen or Doug Sahm sprinkled on top of an already calorie-rich dish. Don’t call it a comeback or a rebrand; Bingham just seems finally settled, as his voice has for decades.
It’s easy for any country singer to self-loathe, but Ryan Bingham has had plenty of opportunity now to stare himself down in the mirror and see the warts for what they are. Not necessarily flaws, but maybe more so character traits he’s learned to develop and even embrace. They Call Us The Lucky Ones is extremely confident despite Bingham’s long road to self-realization, hooting with owls as easily as it can soar with the New Mexico buzzards circling over the ghost towns he’s been the narrator of his whole career. Even when things get intrinsic, Bingham still manages to keep the story at a third-person distance. His most bona fide country trait may be realizing that the story doesn’t belong solely to him.
