Colter Wall Little Songs Review: Comfortingly Contemplative Cowboy Music

The cowboy singer—that rugged rambler yodeling his way across the wide, lonesome plains of the American West—lost his mystique so long ago that some might assume that the character was just made up for old black-and-white movies. So when you first catch a glimpse of Colter Wall, a twentysomething singer-songwriter from Saskatchewan in a Stetson hat, it’s reasonable to assume that it’s a put-on. As it turns out, though, Wall doesn’t just sing cowboy songs, he lives them. When not on tour, he works as a rancher (which may or may not be an elaborate ruse to, understandably, avoid appearing on The Joe Rogan Experience).

Only with that in mind can Wall’s fourth studio album, Little Songs, be fully appreciated as not just a charming batch of old-fashioned country-western tunes, but as something more personal and carefully considered. While it lacks the stark viscerality of the signer’s self-titled 2017 debut, Little Songs, like 2020’s Western Swing & Waltzes and Other Punchy Songs, eschews familiar folk-based influences like Bob Dylan and Townes Van Zandt in pursuit of capturing a more novel and idiosyncratic style, at least in comparison to Wall’s peers.

Accompanied by his touring band and co-producer Patrick Lyons, Wall recorded Little Songs in Wimberly, Texas, in the heart of “the home of Willie Nelson…the home of western swing,” as Waylon Jennings put it on “Bob Wills Is Still the King.” Both influences figure prominently here, and “Standing Here” especially plays like a spiritual sequel to Nelson’s “Hello Walls,” both in Wall’s conversational delivery and the surroundings he finds himself in: an unremarkable room in which he’s “beating on my walls and on my brain.” (Tellingly, it’s not a broken heart he’s hiding out from, but “all them music people” who would “sell me for a nickel.”)

Wall’s band approaches the tropes of western swing with a perfectly light touch, keeping the mood grounded and intimate, never hokey or ironic. You can practically feel the dust hanging in the air between the notes of “For a Long While,” which, with its pillowy accompaniment of dobro and harmonica, conjures idyllic images of golden-hour campfires under big skies.

Notably, following the cover-heavy Western Swing & Waltzes, eight of the 10 tracks here are original compositions. With their tales of lost lovers and drunk cowboys, the album’s two covers—of Hoyt Axton’s “Evangelina” and Ian Tyson’s “The Coyote & the Cowboy”—introduce a sense of romantic escapism that’s a crucial component of cowboy music. In that sense, they stand apart from the Wall-penned songs, which are largely grounded in everyday experiences.

But while the original songs find Wall largely preoccupied with day-to-day facts and simple pleasures—a trusty guitar, a plate of beans, a dance with a girl—they also subtly reveal themselves as products of personal reflection and revelation. “I might get to thinking/That I might could quit drinking/But then what else is there to do?” Wall ponders on “Corralling the Blues”—which seems like a reasonable question given how often he seems to find himself alone, simply contemplating one thing or another, throughout Little Songs.

Later, on the rollicking title track, Wall seems to find an answer to his existential conundrum. “You might not see a soul for days on them high and lonesome plains,” he laments, and so “You got to fill the big empty with little songs.” The landscape-as-the-mind double meaning has the unmistakable folksy wit and wisdom that you can only get from a classic country song, while acting as a perfect thesis statement for the album as a whole. Viewed in that light, these deceptively deep “little songs” start to sound like self-therapy to pass the lonesome days and nights on the plains—to ward off “the big empty” from consuming him completely.