Dan Cugnet

Today’s the day! This album’s live on most platforms for download/streaming. If U enjoy, please share & like. ThankU to contributing musicians, friends & artists for feedback, the amazing producer Bart McKay, & my family. #debut #countrymusic #outlawmusic music.apple.com/ca/album/rodeo…

Very pleased to release my 7th album today. This collection of songs are all based on true stories & the majority of them right here in SE Saskatchewan with many from the Weyburn area. Many of us grew up hearing snippets of some of these stories from older generations or neighbours & the local history from around here. Some of these tales are from over a hundred years ago & some in just the last few years. I’ve always been drawn to stories like this & story songs themselves. Due to much of it being verbal history, slightly different versions or twists on it would tend to emerge with the passage of time as each teller might get something wrong or change it. Our memories change, people embellish or exaggerate, & it’s really all but impossible to ever catch & incorporate every variable. The old saying goes that there’s usually two sides to a story and often there might be a hundred or a thousand. “Five Busted Ribs” came about from a group chat amongst friends one day, and a certain tall Dutchman from the Griffin area many would know, relaying parts of his near death experience on a trail ride down by Gladmar from a few years ago. “Susan” is the story of the death of a bachelor & his young housekeeper in an old homestead fire under suspicious and odd circumstances that was a story I heard growing up. Snippets of a dark event shrouded in a mystery, and only a small iron cross marking a babies grave now to point to any event ever happening at all. Just down the road from where I grew up. “The Graburn Letters” was a poem written by a former politician turned cowboy and now songwriter Mr. @BradWall306. It captures an event near Fort Walsh in the earliest days of the Mounties that he sent to me. The story of one of the constables there that evolved in the form of letters between him, his mother and his commanding officer depicting that time. Some back and forth between Brad and I clipped, edited, tweaked and added the music for what has become a sad but lovely telling of Constable Graburn and his untimely demise as a member of the North West Mounted Police. Terri Harris-Strunk added her talents which without, this song was incomplete. Being able to co-write & create a song with Brad is an honour and a gift. Thank you for the opportunity to help create and bring this song to life. 🙏 @RCMPSK Also, thanks to Lorne Ebel for discussing his memories & also sharing old newspaper clippings from some of the events around an incident that culminated between two of the Ebel’s neighbours Ward and Rudolph many years ago in a song I called “Halbrite Shootout”. This was another one as the crow flies just a few miles from my yard now & there’s still bullet holes in the side of an old grey shack as a silent reminder that it ever happened. Like all these songs on this album some of this is fact, some of it is speculation, and much of it is just attempts at filling in the gaps for the things we will never know or understand. So yes, there are many liberties taken with each one of these songs to helpfully tell a story, share some history but ultimately create something entertaining. I hope you enjoy all of them and in a future post I can give a little more background to the other songs in this compilation. I thank the incredible & gracious Bart McKay for his care and work producing. He continues to be an absolute master at his craft which you can hear in every one of these songs. It is a privilege to get to do this with him. Huge thank you to the session performing artists on these songs. As always their contributions & sum of the parts are so much greater than anything I could imagine. Each one of them elevates every song they’re a part of. Jenee Fleenor, Murray Pulver, Chad Melchert, Travis Switzer, Eddy Dunlap, Randy Miller Gord Maxwell, Dean McNeill, Dave Anderson, Terri Harris-Strunk and Bart McKay. Thank you everyone for listening & I hope you enjoy these “Mostly True Stories”. Available on all streaming platforms today. music.apple.com/ca/album/mostl…