I launched Saddle Mountain Post in order to bring attention to the incredibly talented and insightful young artists driving a revolution in country music—and the cultural fabric. In the past six years, there’s no artist I’ve listened to, or contemplated, more than Colter Wall. It's a joy to return to Saddle Mountain with an examination of his exquisite, lonesome, and important new album, "Memories and Empties." After finishing the piece, Colter canceled a tour, citing the need to focus on his mental health. I applaud him, and everyone else he may have inspired to seek support. His new record reasons with certain aspects of mental health and wellness, and may well be his best yet, the kind of work remembered years later for having captured something raw and essential about our times.

For nearly a decade, Colter Wall has been associated with the renewal of cultural attention on the North American West. The Saskatchewan-based rancher and songman released three albums and a half-dozen singles, constructing an exquisite collection of western music and cowboy songs that breathed new life into an old art form, simultaneously reviving and reinventing the storied genre.

Performing at rodeos and roundups from Calgary to Las Vegas, his music a staple across Taylor Sheridan’s popular television shows, the private Wall earned a legion of fans and emerged not only as a chronicler of modern, authentic westernism, but as a symbol of it as well.

On his new record, Memories and Empties, Colter ambles off the terra firma for a nearby, but decidedly different, parcel of country music’s vast soundscape, one that is unmistakenly fuller, lively, piano-forward, more sophisticated in its arrangements and instrumentation, with drinkin’ songs and poems of longing.

In other words, a fastball straight-down-the-middle Honky Tonk record, as a country musician friend told me, admiringly, referring to the sub-genre that arose in the 1940s from the working class bars and dance halls by the same name, music that had to be played in a punchy, amplified style to be heard over the din, and characterized by songs about heartbreak and bar life.

Classifying music too precisely is often more confusing than clarifying, but Memories and Empties does have an abiding respect for Honky Tonk music, channeling its looser grooves, instrumental solos, complex chord changes and song themes. Like all of Wall’s work, this record is deeply learned, informed by Texas and Bakersfield, and it respectfully nods to icons like Merle Haggard, Ray Price, even Bob Wills, whose Western swing heavily influenced the early Honky Tonkers.

Yet, Wall has a way of inhabiting the musicspace he enters, absorbing its many nuances while also bringing his whole self to the enterprise—thus creating something altogether new and alive. Memories and Empties might be a Honky Tonk record, but it was still written atop a saddle.

The album is bookended by two decidedly western songs. “1800 Miles” places us right where Wall has always been, in Western Canada, where “it’s Tyson songs on the fiddle and guitar,” but the hard-charging song, bursting with piano, organ, electric guitar and Allman Brothers energy, also signals the shifting sound.

The tune is an urgent entry into the rich canon of anti-country music establishment songs, a category that sprung up as a reaction to the industry’s tragic narrowing, and comical packaging, of this broad and diverse musical genre. Rather than a flip of the bird though, Colter treats the subject with humble bemusement, akin to Waylon Jennings’ “Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way,” and the self-assurance of someone a decade into his recording career.

And by opening the song, and album, with the words, “I don’t know what you think you’ve been told,” before asserting his independence from Nashville, a fact that doesn’t need asserting if you’ve ever listened to his music or followed his career, he is addressing the moveable-truth-“they-say”-zeitgeist of our times, imploring us to trust our eyes and ears over the Internet, social media or other intermediaries who would filter and interpret our experiences for us.

Wall closes the record with Ian Tyson’s western classic “Summer Wages,” another gesture to home, and another demonstration of his reverence for Western Canada’s country music songwriters, none more celebrated than Tyson. And while, sonically, this version of “Summer Wages” would have fit on any of his previous three records, and indeed, echoes the performance he gave Western AF back in 2021, the song’s ethic, and the album’s final line, “Years are gambled, and gone like summer wages” touches the thematic underbelly of this one.

Honky Tonk music, like all genres and subgenres, not only has a distinct style and sound, but its own songwriting and vocal traditions, its own language. And it’s here that Wall demonstrates his mastery of the form, and growth as an artist.

Vocally, the music requires a broad range. It expects high notes and small pitch bends, a slight nasal delivery, and a tone that is focused and cutting. Wall likely could not have made this record earlier in his career, but today his voice is a resonant, mature, versatile vocal instrument, silky and coarse, like a horse’s mane, and more than equal to the demands of this barroom music.

“That’s Colter singing full takes with the band,” the album’s co-producer and Wall’s long-time collaborator Pat Lyons told me. “There’s no backing it out, or fixing his voice or punching in things. That’s him doing a full complete take. We all had to play it right, and he had to sing it right. If one didn’t happen, we had to re-do it. He sang his ass off on this record. I don’t know many singers that are able to do that. I give all the credit to him. It was pretty incredible to watch.”

Wall adapts to Honky Tonk’s lyrical traditions as well, like the use of linguistic or logic twists as hooks. “The longer you hold on, the further down I’ll fall,” and “My present just gets past me everyday,” are salutes to the same forces Lefty Frizzell was honoring when he wrote, “If You’ve Got the Money, I’ve Got the Time.” On the punchy “It’s Getting So,” the way Wall stacks sharp consonants together in a strong internal cadence is itself a hymn to the genre.

Well, I could stay home, do my drinking alone, I suppose it’d be better that way.

My barroom companions would be understanding, and probably glad for the change.

But to tell you the truth, I’m too long in the tooth to start changing my old evil ways.

So before your next rebuke, there’s a shot I’d like to shoot and you might too if you’re planning to stay.

In mood, Honky Tonk can be a sad music, vulnerable and deeply personal. Hank Williams’ “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” was one of the genre’s first seedpods, spawning an entire subgenre of songs devoted to the emotion, and maybe, hopefully, permission to its listeners to examine their own dark feelings. On Memories and Empties, Wall pulls off a different feat. The word “lonesome” doesn’t appear on the album, but that’s exactly how you feel after listening to it. And while he glances at the native Honky Tonk theme of good-love-gone-bad, Wall is studying something else here entirely.

photo courtesy of LaHonda Records

“4/4 Time” as a hook is another clever wave to Honky Tonk, the genre’s standard structure, but as a song, it is a totem of the album’s lonely disposition. Wall has written lovingly about music before, practically devoting his last album, Little Songs, to the subject. He’s touted music’s powers to comfort and fulfill us, celebrated its capacity to enable a first dance, and, even back to “Western Swing and Waltzes,” reminded us that music binds us to our experiences, and to each other.

But with “4/4 Time,” Wall offers something different. Windswept, contemplative, melancholy, with a somber instrumental ride-out that lets the mood settle in, it’s the prayer of a singin’ ranchman whose melodic cries of marvel ache with emotion, and reverberate in Wall’s powerful voice, a reminder that close encounters with the divine can leave us cold with aloneness.

If there’s a prevailing narrator on the album, it’s an old rancher in winter, and the loneliness Wall came to study is the kind that accompanies old age, frailty, and the knowledge that life’s last season is here. Throughout his career, the now-30-year old Wall has often been called an old soul, but on this album, he seems to wear the skin too.

On the Saskatchewan prairies where Wall was grown, the proud and weathered ranchman is part of the landscape. He’s a neighbor, not a distant archetype. Wall has paid homage to this figure before, and he’s placed his weary presence—and somber mood—across Memories and Empties. Even on a classic Honky Tonk heartsick song like “My Present Just Gets Past Me,” the tormentor in the narrative isn’t a cheating spouse, it’s the passage of time

Wall casts him as the protagonist on the album’s most emotionally resonant song, “Back to Me,” the story of an old cowboy slipping into dementia. There’s a tenderness when he sings to a love in his life:

But in time I know my mind will come back to me,

Like the songs that my momma used to sing.

I’ll remember who I am, if you grab aholt my hand,

I’ll recall you are my all and everything.

It’s a warm thought, a love so strong it believes the touch of a hand will restore what the disease has ravaged. But as the listener, all too familiar with how dementia ends, we grieve mightily for the romantic cowboy. His wish won’t be granted, and his trail ahead so lonesome the whippoorwill will cry for him.

The album’s title track, “Memories and Empties,” seems an emotional stablemate of “Back to Me.” In it, Wall is also exploring the nature of memory. But in this case, the narrator isn’t trying to remember, he’s trying to forget. “Replacing memories with empties again,” is a beautiful expression of a classic Honky Tonk trope, sitting on a barstool, drowning one’s sorrows. But again, Wall has textured the song in a way that suggests there’s a different interpretation to be had.

The song is sparse, even funereal, Wall’s voice low and slow. And when he starts the song by singing, “There’s a path that I regularly walk down, in the dark empty streets of mind,” it feels like another song about the decline of mental faculty. Wall used the term “big empty,” after all, on the title track of Little Songs to mean the void at the center of our existence, so when he sings here, “Replacing memories with empties,” it’s worth wondering if the song is about more than losing them to alcohol’s temporary reprieve.

Indeed, the album’s many musical influences notwithstanding, the work of art it most conjures for me is Eugene O’Neill’s play The Iceman Cometh. Written with gritty realism during the depths of the Great Depression, and organized around a group of hard-edged, story-swapping fellas in a saloon, the play examines how we act when met with harsh realities, including our pending demise. Memories and Empties, written with gritty realism in whatever godforsaken time we’re living through, reckons with the same material.

But while O’Neill posits that pipe dreams and false hope are essential distractions against the misery, Wall reminds us of a different point of view, that deliverance from our misery comes from being present with our daily work, and from pausing long enough to hear a meadowlark, contemplate the sky, or count our blessings.

This idea culminates on the song “Living by the Hour,” another ranch story, and maybe, as a message to those who need it, the most important song on the album. The protagonist, reflecting on the unpredictable swings of life’s pendulum, turns to the same coping mechanism many of us off the ranch practice in these strange, uncertain times, an ancient, knowing mantra of nowness, and perhaps the only healthy response to the kinetic, warp speed pace of our daily lives.

Just keep living by the hour.

Ready for Colter. photo courtesy of LaHonda Records.