Ian Tyson has long been a cowboy. It’s the cowboy in him that rides out in a May blizzard to find calves, heat them up with a brand, and ride miles back into a barb-wire wind. That gritty part of Tyson is at the heart of his latest album, which is ironic. Unlike much of his earlier work, Yellowhead to Yellowstone is not a cowboy album. Sure, there are the cowboy stories — told like only Tyson can tell them — about originals like Spanish Ranch boss Bill Kane and even about Don Cherry, a hockey buckaroo if there ever was one.

Yet it’s no cowboy album; there is very little prairie light here. Rather, Yellowhead is an album darkened by the long shadows cast by Tyson’s seven decades on the planet. It’s music lacerated by the fallout of broken hearts, broken vows and broken bottles. The title track, a narrative told from the point of view of a wolf transported from Alberta to Wyoming, is a love story that claws together youthful energy, survival, wisdom and death in a touching narrative. Co-written with Stewart McDougall, it is easily one of Tyson’s best songs, showing that whatever he had to live through to earn his long shadow, it was worth it.

Only someone with the soul of a cowboy could have created this album. Only someone with a stomach for riding out into that blizzard, blue hands be damned because it had to be done, could have gone into these empty corrals of the heart, revisited the footprints and stirred the dust back up. Only someone who lives on Alberta beef, Canadian whisky and prairie hope could have made this album.