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Perryton's Ryan Culwell evokes Springsteen's 'Nebraska' on new album

Josh Davis
/
rollingstone.com

Sometimes you’ve got to leave home… to see home.  That’s how Rolling Stone says it was for Ryan Culwell. 

Rolling Stone’s Andrew Leahey writes:

Ryan Culwell grew up in the Texas panhandle, a windswept place filled with oil fields and open plains. It was there, surrounded by flatlands stretched to the horizon, that he began writing his own songs, looking to better understand the spirit and sparseness of his home by setting it to a soundtrack of acoustic Americana and dusky folk music. 

It took moving to Nashville to give him the objectivity he needed to define his birthplace writes Leahey. 

"I couldn't make this kind of music in Texas," he says. "Years ago, I was playing my songs in a bar there, and some kid walked up to me in the first cowboy hat he ever owned and said, 'Play some Texas country!' And I said, 'What the hell do you think I'm doing?' I grew up 100 feet from a wheat field, so I'd always thought of myself as, 'Here I am in this Texas country scene, playing my songs.' That day, though, I looked at my wife and said, 'Maybe we can't do this here.'"

Culwell sings about dust storms, loss, long workdays, and cold weather on his album Flatlands.  The album will be released March 3.

Rolling Stone calls Flatlands the Bible Belt cousin to Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska.

The magazine says the record serves as both "celebration and critique, examining the area’s duality by praising and lamenting the roughhewn lives it creates."

You can stream the tracks using this link.