The singer and ‘Yellowstone’ actor brings his Americana and outlaw country band to GLC Live at 20 Monroe on Friday. Writer Dave Gil de Rubio interviews the Texas-based star.
Ryan Bingham: ‘You’ve got to follow your heart and gut.’ (Photo/Elias Tahan)
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At this juncture in his career, most people know Ryan Bingham as the actor who plays Walker, an itinerant ranch hand on the wildly successful neo-Western drama “Yellowstone.”
But long before he cut his acting teeth in both this series and the 2009 Jeff Bridges drama “Crazy Heart,” Bingham had planted the seed for his creative path as part of a wave of insurgent outlaw country and Americana artists that included Lost Highway Records labelmates Lucinda Williams, Hayes Carll, Ryan Adams and Mary Gauthier.
With the New Mexico native’s previous studio album being 2019’s “American Love Song,” Bingham is finally getting back to his first love — music — with the recent release of the album, “They Call Us The Lucky Ones,” and a string of concert dates he’s performing with his band The Texas Gentlemen.
“Me and this band, The Texas Gentlemen, have been touring and I absolutely love these guys. They are fantastic,” Bingham excitedly said in a recent interview. We’ve been touring together the past couple of years and I’ve been so busy with some of the other stuff — TV shows and things — it’s nice to finally get a break from that and get back to some music.”
‘The Lucky Ones’: The Album
With so much of his focus on acting, the Texas-based, 45-year-old singer-songwriter was eager to pivot back to music. And while this form of creative expression wasn’t totally absent in the six years between “American Love Songs” and the current album — he posted covers and released songs on his YouTube channel The Cantina Sessions and released the 2023 EP “Watch Out For the Wolf” — Bingham welcomed reuniting with his longtime engineer Grant Jackson on the new material.
“I’ve been working with Grant for over 20 years and he’s got a great studio in Fort Worth,” Bingham explained. “The Texas Gentlemen are all based out of Dallas and Austin. We’ve been recording live and working with Grant for a long time. This was something I’ve been talking with him about for a long time.
“The band is absolutely great. They can play so many different styles of music. We’re not limited to any direction we can go and Grant’s got such a great ear for capturing the way we sound from touring and doing so many live shows with us. We just felt it was real organic and natural to get in the studio here in Texas and knock it out.”
AN UPCOMING TOUR STOP IN GRAND RAPIDS
With “They Call Us The Lucky Ones” out, diving back into playing live is the next step Bingham is taking in putting music on the front burner of his day-to-day life.
“We’ve got a pretty cool show we’ve put together,” he said. “We’re playing a lot of old songs and we’re going to be playing a lot of new songs.”
Bingham and his band bring their “Still Gettin’ Away With It” tour to GLC Live at 20 Monroe in Grand Rapids at 8 p.m. Friday. Tickets, $25-$112.10, available online here.
Bingham got a relatively late start making music, and while his country music inspirations were shaped by the likes of legends like Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Buck Owens and Merle Haggard, his early music exposure ranged from his mom buying him a Run-DMC cassette when he was 10 to seeing Cypress Hill play at Houston area’s Woodland Pavilion, which he said “was effing awesome.” Bingham’s mother bought him his first guitar when he was 16, but he didn’t start playing until he moved in with his father in Laredo the following year.
Bingham: ‘Getting back to some music.’ (Photo/Elias Tahan)
“One of my dad’s buddies could play the guitar,” Bingham said. “He taught me how to play some kind of older mariachi music and ‘Malagueña’ was the first song I learned.”
Following his three-album run on Lost Highway Records, Bingham founded his own imprint, Axster Bingham Records in 2012, on which he’s released four of his own albums to date. Five years later, a meeting with future “Yellowstone” co-creator Taylor Sheridan steered Bingham back toward acting.
“Taylor and another friend of mine named John Linson, who is one of the guys who produced ‘Yellowstone,’ reached out to me about using some of my songs and possibly writing some for the show. From there, they learned I used to rodeo and my family ranched. I grew up with a lot of the cowboy stuff, so they said they had to figure out a way to get me in the show and it all kind of started from there.”
While acting has provided a nice detour, Bingham is ready to take his experiences and pour them into new songs. Young adult trauma like losing his mother to alcoholism and his father to suicide influenced albums like 2012’s “Tomorrowland,” shaped Bingham’s resilience and he let his music reflect that.
“You’ve got to navigate a lot of those choices and things that came into the gauntlet of life,” Bingham said. “You’ve got to follow your heart and gut and do the best you can with what you’ve got.” – By Dave Gil de Rubio, Last Word Features
VIDEO: Ryan Bingham & The Texas Gentlemen, “The Lucky Ones”
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