Rustler's Moon

 

Wade Montgomery, Rustler's Moon

This morning I have a new album on repeat as I prepare my usual breakfast of an apple, black tea and a toasted English muffin with peanut butter. Rustler’s Moon by Wade Montgomery, first released in 1994, so it is not a new album by any means, but it is new to me. And I love every song on the ten track release. It is classic western music, songs about bucking horses and growing up on the Northern Cheyenne reservation, gold panners in Idaho and lost love. While all the songs may not be personal stories, they clearly come from life experience. I am humming along to songs like Bound for Billings and Weakness as I scoop the last large gobs of peanut butter out of the jar and hand the nearly empty Skippy container to the impatient husky beside me for cleaning. He trots into the mudroom with his prize and I do a Google search for Wade.

All I can find are links to his songs on Spotify, a live performance on 11th and Grant radio show in Bozeman from 2010 and an obituary in the Bozeman Daily Chronicle from 2017 that I can’t read because I don’t have a subscription. I understand them wanting compensation for recent news coverage, but I reckon obituaries and anything more than five years old should be fair game for internet sleuths like me. Anyway, info on Wade is hard to come by. There are a few pictures of a large handlebar-mustached man with a guitar, but no website, no wikipedia page, a single guitar tab. There is a facebook page managed by his daughter, who sells his CD’s and notes in numerous posts that Wade never logged onto his account, yet he still managed to collect 977 friends, including people I know. His residence is listed as Cowboy Heaven. I am glad this exists because it shows that the musicians' songs live on long after they are gone, reaching new audiences and accumulating new followers. 

We are currently in the age of mass music, where streaming services like Pandora, Spotify and Apple Music have millions of customers and billions of streams. Most people listen to popular music curated by algorithms that maximize profits for the platforms and the few artists lucky or talented enough to make the cut. Thousands, if not millions of small artists pay to get their songs up on these platforms, though few ever make enough money to survive. The royalties pay $0.003 per stream, which means you need to have approximately 487,000 streams every month to make the equivalent of minimum wage in Montana. Artists like Wade have a cumulative stream count of less than half of that. But at least they have a platform so people like me can discover them. I look deep in the wells of Spotify, or down the Google rabbit hole, or on obscure country music blogs to find the talented artists whose music never sees the light of day. There is no conspiracy against them, it is just the way the world works; music is a hard business to break into and there is a ton of competition. Deserving artists with incredibly deep and wise messages toil away for their entire life with nothing to show but a catalog of songs, a few t-shirts sold and the tips of the strangers who happened to stop in for a beer some night. No one buys CDs anymore, so most artists are left with only the streaming platforms.

I find a lot of joy in finding artists like Wade because I know that he probably had to work a full time job just to support his music career, just like I do. And even now that he is gone, his music still resonates like I hope mine will someday. Wade is the latest in a string of artists that I have unearthed over the years who may be locally famous but nationally unknown. Their albums are on Spotify to listen to. Other breakfast albums include Anna Lynch’s self titled album from 2013, Belle Plaine’s Malice, Mercy, Grief and Wrath, John Wort Hannam’s Queen’s Hotel, or my most recent discovery Hibernator’s EP. None of these people will ever open for the Rolling Stones or perform on the Grammy’s, but their music is pleasant to listen to and has a message worth hearing, particularly over breakfast. I have reached the final track, Weakness and the time that I need to head off to work in 9 degree temps. At the end of one work day, another will begin, where I sit down with my guitar and just maybe, write my own album to be found on Spotify someday soon.