With a dust-caked, desiccated voice that at 28 is already comparable to Tom Waits's and a hard-scrabble sound that would be a perfect accompaniment for one of Annie Proulx's western stories or a Coen brothers film, singer-songwriter-guitarist Ryan Bingham is a 21st-century honky-tonk hero as genuine as a belt of whiskey before noon. His gritty tales of life on the frontier—literal, emotional, and with a newfound focus on the political—are punched up with wiry guitars that sting like a panhandle hailstorm and are fueled by a cinematic life story. Bingham Drifted throughout the west Texas-New Mexico border area, on his own by his mid-teens, earning his way riding bulls on the rodeo circuit, and eventually falling in with the likes of Joe Ely, Terry Allen, and the Texas songwriters... More >>>