He may have won a Golden Globe and an Oscar, but songwriter Ryan Bingham’s heart is a long way from Tinseltown
HIS STORY could be pure Hollywood. Born in the small town of Hobbs, New Mexico, a few miles from the Texas border 29 years ago, Ryan Bingham survives a dysfunctional childhood to join the rodeo as a young teen. He sticks with his peripatetic chosen career before music intrudes at age 18 and he discovers that not only can he manage to ride bucks and broncos but he can also tame a tune. He forms a band – the Dead Horses – with a couple of friends, learns his trade in honky-tonks and bars before he bags a recording contract.
Fast forward a couple of years and Scott Cooper, the director of Crazy Heart,asks him if he would be interested in writing a song for his upcoming movie which stars Jeff Bridges as an over-the-hill country singer on his last legs. The Weary Kindis the result and earlier this year it wins a Gold Globe award for best original song before scooping the Oscar in the same category two months later.
It has to be one of those self-referencing Hollywood scripts – except that Ryan Bingham refuses to play that role.
So when he is asked if the accolades have changed him, he bursts out in a raw-throated laugh coated in Southern drawl: “Hell, no. It just changes the people around you. You still wake up and put your pants on, one leg at a time. It does change stuff, business-wise; it created a lot of opportunities for us. I mean a lot of people got turned on to our music through that film that would never have heard of us.”
Playing music is what is important to him. Bingham and other three Dead Horses, Matthew Smith, Elijah Ford and Corby Schaub, have recently released their impressive third album, Junky Star.Lest anybody be misled by the title to thinking it some celebration of drug culture, it is the opposite. Bingham moved to Los Angeles a couple of years ago and the album contains his doleful reflections on what he witnessed in the Golden State.
“Travelling around the country the past few years, and moving to LA, just living out there, has made a big impact on me. There are a lot of different sides to California, a lot of different people, there’s like a large base of homeless kids who live on Venice [Beach], just hanging around and every time you wanted to write a song, all you had to do was take a walk outside and look around you, describe where you are. It’s been a big part of this record, just describing what I see, what I am surrounded by. It’s a sad and beautiful world sometimes.”
He agrees comparisons could be drawn with Bruce Springsteen's stark acoustic album Nebraska,though Junky Stardoes feature some sterling band performances. "I've definitely been influenced by him in the past. With this album I just wanted to get back to a song, an acoustic guitar, to keep it simple, stripped down. I just wanted to let the songs stand on their own."
If the album is more thoughtful and stripped back than its more raucous predecessors, it still has a gritty, honest feel, courtesy of ace producer T-Bone Burnette, with whom Bingham worked on The Weary Kind(indeed he gets a co-writer credit).
The album is also a long distance from the country outlaw figure Bingham was painted as for his first album, Mescalito.In truth that album was a little too raw to stretch inside country's increasingly wide girth but that suits him just fine. "I'm not much of a fan of country music. I'm a fan of old country – Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard – but the kind of shit that goes on today I'm not much of a fan of. I think a lot of the reason that we got lumped in with the country set is that I wear a cowboy hat. I don't think we have ever been a country band. I come from New Mexico where we wear cowboy hats and so folks would say: 'Oh these guys wear cowboy hats, they must be a country band.' Also, when you are a new artist and record companies are trying to figure out how to sell your records and market you, they gotta stick you somewhere. I think we've grown out of it now. When people come to see us, they know it gonna be a little different from country music."
Ryan Bingham comes across as a rugged sounding character with a gift for making music that matters and is also fun. He says the secret is you’ve got to do what’s in your heart and stick to it. Asked what’s in his heart, he says: “Be honest with the music and create what you want to create. In big picture terms you’ve got to think: why do you do it? If it’s not about the music or the songs, is it about fame or money? You have to understand what you are in it for. When I got into music first, writing songs was about venting, getting stuff off my chest, a form of therapy if anything.
“Then when I met the guys in the band and we started going out on the road we were more like a family than a band, we were just playing music to survive, to get a roof over our heads. We all kind of took care of each other. It [playing music] was just in our blood. I don’t think we could have done anything other than it. And as long as it stays like that I’m good to go.”
Ryan Bingham and the Dead Horses play the Sugar Club, Dublin on Saturday.
* Junky Staris available on Lost Highway Records
