Inman launching new album at WECC

Give Richard Inman a moment and a surface, and he’ll cover it with a story.

“I’ve scribbled down lyrics on paper plates, McDonald’s bags — whatever you got,” says Inman, who grew up in southern Manitoba but now lives in a three-bedroom ranch house near Twin Butte, Alta., so close to the American border that he says he can spit into Montana from his backyard.

“The other day I had a line in my head for seven hours before I wrote it down,” says the songwriter, who managed to remember the phrasing after driving home from a music festival in Idaho. “That certainly was lucky.”

Though Inman, 35, first starting sharing his Americana concoctions with crowds at Winnipeg’s Times Change(d) High & Lonesome Club in the late 2000s, learning how to play his compositions with his band, the Mad Trappers, he has spent the bulk of the past decade out west, splitting time between the stage and the sale barn.

“I started working at ranches at the start of the pandemic — growing up, we had a dairy operation south of Winnipeg — so I always was involved with agriculture. But after playing music so long, when the pandemic happened, I started working out in B.C., doing some of the lowest work — the shit-shovelling, swinging gates stuff,” says Inman.

It might be a stretch to say he loved it, but the labour has helped fill his notebook, connecting Inman to the types of characters and experiences that had long populated his imagination and animated his gravelly country songs.

“I think I’m the kind of writer where most things that I do, I get something out of it. What works best for my brain, for my writing, is probably manual labour. I’ll be helping a neighbour with small chores, and then something comes to me,” he says.

Travelling as restlessly as he does with his backing band, the Western Canadian All-Stars, does give Inman a fair deal of inspiration, but much of his latest record Damage I Done — which he releases today with a show at the West End Cultural Centre — is rooted in collaborative writing sessions at his ranch house, a place that has an unofficial open-door policy for songwriters criss-crossing the Prairies.

“I like the philosophy of songwriters coming through and feeling at home,” says Inman.

Sometimes, as in the case of the song Lovin’ and Leavin’, those stop-ins leave the kitchen table and reach the final track listing.

As Inman tells it, he was recording at his house with Micah Erenberg of the Secret Beach when an 18-year-old songwriter arrived with four boxes of Kraft Dinner, some hot dogs and an apple pie.

It was 2022, and the young musician was Noeline Hofmann, whose single Purple Gas was re-recorded as a duet with country superstar Zach Bryan for his 2024 album The Great American Bar Scene.

Alberta’s Hofmann, who had spent time as a teenager working on a Manitoba cattle ranch, has since played the Grand Ole Opry and toured with artists including Charlie Crockett; the 23-year-old songwriter is slated to open for country star Shaboozey on an eight-stop tour in September.

“I’m not taking credit for anything,” says Inman with a laugh, “but I told her there’s nothing stopping her from making it in the States. As a songwriter, she says in three minutes the things that take me six.”

So, when Inman was gathering material for Damage I Done, he found the lyrics for Lovin’ and Leavin’ in a forgotten notebook. Funnily enough, his band hadn’t initially liked the track years earlier, but when Inman sent a voice memo to a few confidants, including Hofmann, the reception was warmer.

“It was a whole journey,” he says.

Other tracks, including Strife and Growing Pains and The Poet and the Hand — character-driven tales defined by resignation to solitude — were derived from Inman’s early attempts at writing novels.

“I never finished either one,” says Inman, whose trials as a writer began in high school English class.

“It was the only thing I was good at in school, but my short stories always got too long. They’d just keep going and going.”

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com