The Story of Hard Country 

Hard Country consists of tracks drawn from three albums and one-off recordings from Steve Bonham and The Long Road which capture the essence of this band’s maverick, compelling notion to make something distinctive and original from a musical world we all thought we knew. 

As outsiders, vagabonds, restless spirits, looking for gold, they went back to the source of the rough and ready ingredients that lay behind the extraordinary potent and diverse music distilled from the swamps, the bayou, the forests, mountains and great cities of the southern United States of America.

“Back back to the source?”

The source is not found just in the music and recordings of others but in heading out, out of the tourist bubble, into - deep into - the landscape, the mythology, the people, and the darkness and the light of this place, which exists in the 21st century as a wild mysterious “Old Testament” world, under a veneer of modern and “would-be” sophistication.

These are songs and words crafted from road trips, treks, sleeping out in the open, off the beaten path and the main strip. Hanging out in bars and lonely motels, old moonshine stills in the mountains, with fellow travellers and musicians, the old boys in the back room, bears and Copperhead rattlesnakes. Storytellers, strong women and lesser men, Billy the Kid’s third cousin.

The result?

You’ve heard of heavy metal? Try some heavy wood! Acoustic music that is loud, in your face, potent and powerful. To be taken with a glass of mother's apple pie whiskey next to you, alligator stew on the stove and a grin on your face.

From the almost cinematic “Western Requiem”, as our childhood dreams ride into the sunset of the movie’s close, to the weird invocation of “The Girl with the Rattlesnake Heart”. From the old outlaw with nowhere left to run of “Sally in Blue Flames”, to the lover on the run of “Waiting on a Storm”. From the rebellious defiance of “Moonshine Running” and “Won’t Lay My Guitar Down”, to drinking from the cup of freedom of “Ain’t Gonna Fake It”. And finally, from the surreal vision of “Canyons in the Desert” to the haunting enigma of “The Ballad of Duane and Billy Marie”, these songs are a calling to another world, deeply familiar and utterly strange at the same time. They are a celebration of authenticity, a nod to the wild at heart, and a reminder of the power of music to transcend boundaries.