Old Trails by Forrest VanTuyl

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Great writers like Annie Proulx or Cormac McCarthy have built their careers on the myth of the American West, the stories and vernacular of the American cowboy. For songwriter Forrest VanTuyl (pronounced Van-TILE), McCarthy was his introduction to the poetry of cowboy life. “I read him when I was in my mid twenties,” he says, “and I was like, ‘There we go. That's what I'm going to do.’” True to his word, Forrest moved to Enterprise, Oregon and took work packing mules and working cattle in the steep canyon and alpine country surrounding this remote outdoor destination. The songs on his new album, Old Trails (coming September 5) are inspired in many ways by his time over the past ten years on horseback in little known corners of the Pacific Northwest. Redolent with carefully crafted details of rural life in the West, they speak of the taciturn men and women who work this land of rugged beauty. Forrest currently lives and works in Washington’s interior ranch country with his wife, fellow songwriter Margo Cilker, who co-wrote some of the songs on the album with him. The breaks of the Columbia River rise just in front of his home, and when he walks outside he sees sheep and cattle grazing among groves of Oregon White Oak. “One of the easy things about Western writing is that you've got the landscape as a character,” he says. His songs on Old Trails are filled with the many different personalities of the Western landscape, from the heavy rain that rolls up a mountain’s ridge to the dust on a dirt road that rises like fog. Forrest’s gift as a songwriter is that his songs will always surprise you, eschewing predictable patterns to find a new old trail to ramble down.

Forrest VanTuyl grew up in rural Western Washington, on a farm that grew hay and raised a small herd of beef cattle and dairy replacement heifers. He loved music early on, and was first exposed to cowboy songs when country singer Chris LeDoux played the county fair. LeDoux was a famed rodeo cowboy who used to sling cassette tapes out of the trunk of his car at events before Nashville embraced him, and his early songs carry the true sounds and expressions of life on a horse. Ian Tyson was another key early influence, coming on the heels of Forrest’s love of Bob Dylan, as Ian and Sylvia were key figures in the Greenwich Village folk revival of the 60s. Tyson would later go on to be one of Canada’s pre-eminent folk singers, specializing in cowboy poetry and songs. “That stuff really floored me,” Forrest remembers. “Ian Tyson is the why and how I ended up cowboying for a living and writing that style of music.” From Tyson he learned to write about contemporary ranch life, to write what he saw in front of him, and to write whenever he could grab the time.

"About half this record was written in a feed truck," says Forrest. These flatbed pickups are used by ranch hands to feed supplemental hay to cows in winter, a job that entails long hours of driving poorly maintained roads at 5 miles an hour. The album's title track, “Old Trails”, commemorates these work-worn rigs and other often overlooked details about cowboy life, like old working dogs and the fine art of getting yearlings out of a neighbor’s field. “Rockjack” goes even deeper into cowboy apocrypha, referencing the individualized, improvised fence supports built on terrain too steep and rocky for steel posts, casting them as characters in a song about the pressures of nature on our best efforts at planning.

One of the standout songs on the album, “EZ 2 LOVE U,” co-written with his wife Margo, is a humble song about deep love, something that Forrest says, "takes up plenty of our thoughts in the West, too." Family dynamics figure in with “Middle Child’s Lament” speaking of the push and pull between fathers and sons who work shared land: “let the fields lie fallow, let the rabbit run, damn your plow for I am bound to the arms of my true love.” It sounds like a folk song as old as the hills and Forrest reckons “damn your plow” is the most cowboy sentiment on the record.

The songs of Old Trails, Western and romantic as they are, don't romanticize the West. They’re about hard people that work with land and animals through hard terrain and hard weather. They're about the emotional and philosophical depth that comes from a deep pride in work and land, and Forrest VanTuyl is one of the few songwriters finding a way to truly express it.

Forrest VanTuyl is a Western songwriter, poet, and working cowboy based in the Inland Northwest. His work has been featured in the New York Times, at The National Cowboy Poetry Gathering, and he has written music for the US Forest Service.

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