It’s taken a while, but Red Deer-based country singer Duane Steele is finally releasing a digital album.
The 47-year-old laughs when it’s suggested that country musicians are the last to hop aboard the download train. “It’s because a lot of our audience are rural listeners” without access to highspeed Internet, said Steele.
“With the slow Internet they have on some farms, it would take about a week to download an album!” added the singer/songwriter, who performs a two-night acoustic gig next Thursday and Friday, June 10 and 11, at The Matchbox.
Fortunately for the digitally disadvantaged, Steele is also making a CD version of his upcoming album Gas and Time, which can also be ordered from his website, www.duanesteele.com.
His seventh album is made up of some road songs, such as Long Road, Short Memory, a western tribute (Farm Girl) and a song about gratitude — his single Blessed, which is starting to get some radio play.
Of the latter, Steele said “I just wanted to write a positive song. With so much going on in the news and the world, it’s about finding the little things in life that still mean something.”
The country singer feels blessed to be able to spend time with his wife and 17-month-old son, and to live in this smallish city. “Even though Red Deer has 88,000 to 90,000 people, you can still go to certain shops and they get to know you,” he said. “You get to be friends with people and develop a rapport.”
Retro things seem to resonate with Steele, who wrote his Hooked on Trains song about a Holiday Train tour he did performing with Tom Jackson. It took him from Montreal to Vancouver by rail several years ago.
“It was a beautiful experience,” he recalled.
Seeing Canada the way many early settlers experienced it, from vintage railcars, “is very impressive — just the magnitude of the land, and the beauty of it . . .” he recalled. “The feeling you’re going across the country in this huge piece of iron.”
Steele was particularly struck how many railway workers started working on trains at the age of 16 or 17 and never tired of it. “Thirty years later, they were still there, loving it.”
Steele’s country music career goes back nearly as far — to 1984, when he fronted Rock ’n’ Horse, a band that garnered a Juno Award nomination and several Top 20 singles before disbanding in 1993.
The singer lived for a time in Nashville, before signing with Mercury Records in Canada and putting out a new album every two or three years. He won a couple of Canadian Country Music Awards for the effort and produced some Top 5 singles, including his No. 1 hit, Anita Got Married.
Steele is now on his own Jolt label and is planning an acoustic tour of smaller Canadian centres, starting with his two Red Deer concerts.
He believes fans will enjoy spending an acoustic evening with him and two backup musicians on guitar and mandolin.
“I find in these smaller, more intimate settings, people are listening to the words of the songs more intently and they’re getting a rich musical experience.”
Tickets to each 7:30 p.m. concert are $25 from Ticketmaster or The Matchbox box office.
lmichelin@www.reddeeradvocate.com