Ian Munsick
Ian Munsick’s new album Eagle Feather, out April 18, is more than a love letter to the West. Munsick lives in Nashville, attended Belmont University and in less than five years has become a country music star. But if you ask Munsick who he is, he’s a ranch hand.
“Growing up on a ranch in Wyoming with my dad, my brothers, my mom and the whole community out there,” Munsick says, “even if you’re not a working cowboy, you’re still a cowboy.”
With Eagle Feather, his third studio album, Munsick wanted to show Nashville what the West is really like and tell a more nuanced story of actual cowboy life — not as part of Lower Broadway cowboy cosplay. Eagle Feather illustrates and embraces that wide-open, big-sky remoteness that is part of the Munsick family experience. One of his brothers lives on a ranch that’s a 90-minute drive each way from his kids’ school. Their parents still live on a ranch. If it is light outside, he says, his parents are out working.
“They’re just always doing something to improve the ranch, and just being around that every day really inspired me to not waste,” Munsick says, noting that a work ethic is part of what he sees as the Western way. It’s what has helped him succeed.
Last year, he crossed off a career bucket-list item when he sold out his Red Rocks Amphitheatre debut. The Colorado venue is a Western pinnacle for artists and audiences. And this year, he’s crossing another Western dream off the list: headlining Wyoming’s Cheyenne Frontier Days. And he’s done it without a hit single; he’s had three tracks certified gold by the RIAA, but country radio remains a key metric in the industry. “Long Live Cowgirls,” his 2023 release with Cody Johnson, represents his best performance there so far, peaking at No. 54 on Billboard’s Country Airplay chart.
The 20 tracks on the album document a kind of West that doesn’t show up much in Nashville’s country Western vision. Munsick wrote, performed on and co-produced most of the songs on Eagle Feather — more evidence of that work ethic. The album’s title nods to the actual feather in his signature cowboy hat, and appropriately, highlights include “Feather in My Hat.” He co-wrote the song with Caitlyn Smith and Marc Scibila, and the track features Grammy- and CMA Award-winning megastar Lainey Wilson. When Munsick was on tour with Wilson, she expressed interest in the song, and they recorded it together on her tour bus. In addition to Wilson, the album features other Nashville names including Charlie Worsham and Flatland Cavalry lead singer Cleto Cordero.
“Horses Not Hearts” depicts cowboys as they are to Munsick: reliable Renaissance men, the people you call when you are in a jam. When Munsick first heard the song, which was written by Andy Albert, Michael Tyler and Ben Stennis, he says he was a little bit mad that he had not written the line, “I swear on these stars this cowboy breaks horses not hearts.”
“I was just pissed off,” Munsick says, “because I was like, ‘Man, why didn’t I think of that title?’ It was just kind of a no-brainer to cut that song.”
As the cover of Eagle Feather depicts, Munsick gets all the inspiration for his music from being surrounded by mountains and open sky. But he comes back to Nashville to be in the studio. Wyoming time is for being in Wyoming, riding horses and being outside.
“I know I’m only going to be there for a week or two before I have to go play my next gig, so I want to go out there and experience Wyoming, being out on the land,” he says. “It’s really a blessing being able to go back there and harvest all of these creative experiences and then come back to Nashville and my studio.”
He feels his connection to the land, to “living with the earth, not on the earth,” comes through in his music. And he can’t wait to hear audiences across the country — from Nashville, where he’ll close his winter headline tour on Thursday at The Pinnacle, to Cheyenne and beyond — sing along with “God Bless the West.”
“There’s a spirit attached to it,” Munsick says of the worldwide appeal of the West. “It’s that freedom that we feel in the West — people want to live like that. Even if they’re in New York, they want to live like that.”
