A Star Is Born: Ryan Bingham & the Dead Horses, 'Junky Star' -

The songs — delivered in Bingham’s nicotine-stained voice — were inspired by endless months of touring. He aimed to “describ[e] the past couple of years of traveling around and the people you meet and the condition the country’s in and everything, stuff that goes on around you,” he said.

Bingham’s always been a traveler, but music wasn’t his first career. Before taking the stage, he was a professional rodeo rider, and he has the broken bones to prove it. In the late 1990s, he left that dangerous line of work and started gigging around Los Angeles, writing confessional songs about his own emotional and romantic angst. Soon enough, he hooked up with a likeminded group of musicians who coalesced into the Dead Horses, a supremely road-tested backing band.

“We always had gigs,” he recalls. “We never did rehearse. We never sat in the garage and practiced. We just went out and played these dive bars and roadhouses and open mics. A lot of times we would just make up songs while we were playing. We’d just learn them as we go.”

That loose approach informs the raw, raucous sound of Bingham’s albums. After signing to prominent Americana label Lost Highway, he released “Mescalito” in 2007 and “Roadhouse Sun” in 2009. Around that time he was approached the contribute songs to an independent movie called “Crazy Heart,” about a washed-up country star on the road to spiritual and emotional recovery.

A few years and one Oscar later, Bingham has reunited with T-Bone Burnett, who produced the “Crazy Heart” soundtrack, for “Junky Star,” which represents a huge step forward both musically and lyrically. Working with the esteemed producer gave the band license to rough up its roadhouse rock a bit and expand its repertoire. The result is a noisy and boisterous album, from the shambling opener “The Poet” to the closer “All Choked Up Again,” which sounds like Waylon Jennings at his most downtrodden.

Where once he wrote primarily about himself, Bingham manages to get out of his own head on “Junky Star” to see the world through others’ eyes. He writes mostly in character, and his characters are mostly down-at-the-heels itinerants one step away from a violent end.

It’s a bold step for an artist who could have simply coasted on Oscar glory. Instead, Bingham has crafted a rowdy, often moving chronicle of hard times in all their gritty glory.

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Express spoke to Bingham about his creative process and what inspired his new album:

» EXPRESS: You write a lot of character-driven songs. What inspires that approach?
» BINGHAM: Something that always sticks with me is the homeless situation in the United States. At a lot of the clubs we play, we get done playing for the night, we’re loading the trailer out in the alley, 2 or 3 o’clock in the morning, and we run into the wildest characters you can imagine. We get to see and start to think of life from the perspective of other people and really hear their opinions about what’s happening in the country. When you write songs, you really have to take that into consideration. It seems to have struck a chord with me anyway.

» EXPRESS: Not too many songwriters seem so driven by empathy, by that need to get into other people’s heads.
» BINGHAM: I feel like I’m still learning a lot about writing songs. When I first started, I was writing as a way of venting and getting things off my chest, so things were raw and a lot more personal. But getting older and traveling around just opens your eyes up to what’s happening in the world. You can really see the situations that everybody else is in. You grow up and put some of your personal issues behind you. You start moving on and living the life ahead of you instead of living the life behind you.

» EXPRESS: It seems like a very topical album, recording a particular moment in time. Was that intentional?
» BINGHAM: More than anything, it’s the thing that felt right to me. Whenever you get on the road and you play music for people all over the country and you’re singing the same songs night after night after night, after a while you start thinking, “What the hell am I doing? What the hell am I saying?” In the big picture you want to look back twenty years from now and not have any regrets. I don’t want to think that I never did say anything in any of these songs, so I just want to express the way I feel as best as I can — what I really mean and feel about what’s happening in the world.

» EXPRESS: What was it like working with T-Bone Burnett?
» BINGHAM: When I met T-Bone Burnett on the “Crazy Heart” movie last year. That was the first time that I met him or worked with him. We just had a really good time in the studio and enjoyed each other’s company. I had a bunch of songs written. It came organically. We were in the studio working on the “Crazy Heart” stuff, and I had a bunch of songs and wanted to make a record, and it all fell into place where he had time to do it as well. He liked the songs that I had and the band, so it was really a smooth transition into the record. It was almost like we blinked and it was already recorded and over with and ready to go.

» EXPRESS: How was that experience different from previous albums?
» BINGHAM: The first few records were produced by Marc Ford. We met him when we first came to L.A. and became friends, and he started coming out and jamming with us at shows. At that time, we were really rough around the edges. Me personally, I didn’t know much about playing in a band. It was the first band that I ever played in. Before, I’d always just played acoustic and I’d had some songs written, but Marc really taught me how to play music and how to play the guitar and how to play in a band. Those first few records really taught us a lot and really prepared us for going into the studio with somebody like T-Bone. When you make a record with someone like that, you really have to have your stuff together. You don’t want to go into the studio and spend all day just trying to learn your songs and not have a clear vision of what you want to do. That was one of the things that made it work so well — we had all the songs written and the band was really tight. We’d been playing on the road for a couple of years, and it was just something that we needed to record. We didn’t have to create this whole new sound or anything. It was already there. We just needed to record it.

» EXPRESS: Musically, “Junky Star” seems a lot more varied and adventurous. Was that something that you thought about before you started recording?
» BINGHAM: A little bit. I think T-Bone brings out the best in you. Obviously you want to go in there and have yourself together, but I wanted to get back to the song — just the guitar and the song — and not really worry about having all this production and stuff like that. We kept the songs as simple as possible so we’d have a lot of room to experiment and do different things if we wanted to. But we didn’t want to have to rely on that. Instead, if we just did a song with an acoustic guitar, it could be strong enough to stand on its own without anything else. That way, when the band did come in and play along, it created this whole new atmosphere instead of just being something that you do just because.

» EXPRESS: After winning the Oscar, did you feel much pressure making this record?
» BINGHAM: I had a lot of the songs written before the Oscar stuff happened, so I think if I hadn’t have had any songs, there probably would been had some pressure, because you have all these expectations. But because I did have a lot of those songs done and ready to go, I was more excited than anything else. There are probably a lot of people who would never have heard our music if it wasn’t for that. It was exciting to go in and do this record and have the chance to let our songs live out there. I didn’t really worry about it too much, the expectations. We just tried to do what we do and let the music speak for itself.

Written by Express contributor Stephen M. Deusner

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