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IAN TYSON TO RELEASE NEW STONY PLAIN CD WITH PERSONAL SONGS —
AND A DRAMATICALLY “NEW” VOICE

Ian Tyson, the iconic Canadian songwriter and singer, has had a tough two years since his last album, 2005’s “Songs from the Gravel Road.”

“Dramatic change” hardly comes close to describing a difficult divorce, another broken love affair, and his recent 75th birthday, which he faced with a mixture of satisfaction and regret.

Now, with the release of “Yellowhead to Yellowstone and other Love Stories” on November 11, his long-time fans will discover something else: Ian Tyson has a new voice. It’s his 14th album for the Edmonton-based roots music label Stony Plain, and was produced by Nashville’s Harry Stinson, who did three CDs for the label with Corb Lund, and who’s worked with a who’s-who in Music City, from George Jones and Marty Stuart to Rodney Crowell and Steve Earle.

Grainy, gravelly, and deeply emotional, one of the smoothest voices in Canadian music is now dramatically different. What happened? “Well, a couple of years ago,” says Tyson in a matter-of-fact tone, “I played the Havelock Jamboree, a big outdoor show in Ontario. I fought the sound system — and I lost.

“I knew I’d hurt my voice, and it was recovering slowly when I was hit with a bad virus, which seemed to last forever. My old voice isn’t coming back, the doctors told me, so I’ve had to get used to this new one.”

That has been a challenge, Tyson says, but he says audiences have warmed to it. “They seem to pay more attention, now, to the lyrics and the stories in the songs. And while I’ve lost some of the bottom end of my voice, the top range, oddly enough, is still there.”

The title song of the CD was co-written by Tyson with Stewart MacDougall, and tells the story of a pack of wolves transported from the Yellowhead Pass to Yellowstone Park, where the species had become extinct — told in the voice of one of the wolves who made the journey. Another remarkable song, contributed by Toronto songwriter Jay Aymar, is about hockey commentator Don Cherry and the death of his beloved wife, Rose.

The eight new songs by Tyson cover a range of emotions and stories relating to Alberta’s cultural landscape and the disappearing cowboy, as well as his personal life. The writer rarely tells exactly what they’re about, but expects his listeners to understand where the songs are coming from.

“Yellowhead to Yellowstone and other Love Stories”; Stony Plain is distributed nationally by Warner Music Canada.

This recording is about, songs that stand the test of time and all the memories that are bound to them, courtesy of an artist who is one of the most complete songwriters and storytellersof his generation.

Forty-plus years of great songs, as opposed to forty years of songs written and made popular in the first decade of the ride. Tyson's is a trail of brilliantly crafted songs stretching to every horizon from an artist who continues,to be at the top of his game in this new millennium.

The 15 tracks on this disc represent material found on Tyson albums recorded over five decades.

This beautiful painting by Buckeye Blake is the CD cover of my new album. It will be out by ELKO by end of January with 12 new songs.
The album is called "Songs from the Gravel Road". I like it a lot and hope that you will too.

“Songs from the Gravel Road” was recorded in Toronto with celebrated producer Danny Greenspoon — and a backup band of some of the best players in Toronto. And if the likes of guitarist Kevin Breit, horn players Phil Dwyer, Steve McDade and Guido Basso, and drummer Mark Kelso are better known in the jazz community than the world of “country” music, that’s cool with Tyson.

“I took a gamble,” he says. “They’re young guys, they’re great jazz and pop musicians, and they have no connection with my kind of life. I wanted them to bring a different sensibility to the songs. And they are songs that I couldn’t hear with the standard ‘country’ instrumentation, which is often so mind-numbingly predictable.”

The sessions went incredibly fast — the group cut five songs in a single afternoon, in part because the demos Tyson had made in the stone cottage were such good guideposts. Now the record is done, and Tyson is settling into another heavy round of touring in Canada and the United States.

For four consecutive nights, the license plates on the trucks and cars in the parking lot at the Longview Community Hall pretty much told the story of how loyal and devoted Ian Tyson’s audience continues to be, as the legendary singer and songwriter has entered his fifth decade as a recording artist.

Four frosty fall nights in the foothills of Alberta and a stones throw from the eastern slope of the Canadian Rockies, those plates spoke loud and clear. Wyoming, New Mexico, Arizona, California, British Columbia, Nevada, Colorado, Montana and the list goes on. Hardcore Tyson fans weren’t going to miss out on this special occasion, where tape would be capturing shows comprised of songs that have long been chiseled in stone, plus a handful of new offerings that confirm the artist is still as much of a driven, creative force as he’s ever been.

Not only is the material inspired - Tyson’s story-telling skills are just as sharp or sharper as the days when he was penning country anthems like Someday Soon and Summer Wages - check out his singing, which long ago set the bar in folk and country circles. His vocals are as emotionally charged as they’ve ever been, and still show a remarkable range and deadly accuracy in the delivery department. Not bad for an artist, who, at the age of 68 could easily be resting on past glories, trotting out a greatest hits package night after night, for those audiences who rightfully consider him to be the champion when it comes to expressing cowboy culture through music.

His interesting glimpses into the ages old theme of relationships, or the detailed and alluring portraits of characters he introduces us to, so succinctly yet vividly, are the combined strokes of a master who has been at the top of his game for a long time, and one who isn’t about to settle for anything less. Just check out the new numbers that are interspersed throughout this live collection, his first as a solo artist.

Songs like Desert Motel, Sorta Together, Somewhere In The Rubies and High Plains Town are going to be on the Tyson request lists for years to come.

In essence, this album is an overview of his last twenty or so years of work. The fuse for this fascinating chapter was lit via a critically acclaimed disc titled Old Corrals and Sagebrush. It was an album recorded on his ranch a couple of years after he moved back west, in fact not far from the community hall where the material heard on this album was performed.

So for these shows, Tyson pulled the best of the best together, from albums like the platinum selling Cowboyography, to I Outgrew The Wagon, Eighteen Inches of Rain, and his most recent studio effort Lost Herd.

The time was also right to document the sound of the acoustic trio setting he’s been working in for a few years now. With the two Gords, guitarist Matthews and bassist Maxwell, Ian Tyson has created yet another perfect foundation to set his musical gems in. Not that anyone should be surprised, given the great studio bands he’s assembled over the years, or editions of groundbreaking outfits like the Great Speckled Bird and The Chinook Arch Riders that toured with him, both north and south of the border.

The trio was also joined at the intimate community hall concerts by a couple of Tyson alumni on select cuts, so the names Myran Szott (fiddle) and Thom Moon (drums), will be familiar names to any longtime Tyson fans. Trumpeter Al Muirhead is the other musical friend who made an appearance for the shows.

A special occasion, very special songs from an artist who is an icon in contemporary country, folk and western music, and those extremely appreciative audiences that were in part made up of fans and friends who traveled extraordinary distances, combined for the kind of live recording so many of us have been requesting for a few years now.

Live At Longview, it’s guaranteed to stand right up there with the best in Ian Tyson’s brilliant and acclaimed volume of recorded work, and that’s sayin’ something. Just put it on and in short order you'll feel like you just pulled up next to the Longview Community Hall.