Review | The Hatted Kind | Ryan Bingham at the Santa Barbara Bowl

Country star Ryan Bingham brought out a behatted kind of audience to the Santa Barbara Bowl recently, along with a Southern sound (as in the American South and Southern California) and also a pair of local angles with career-goosing after-effects. In a sense, Bingham’s broader public profile began with his critically acclaimed debut album Mescalito, but bumped up thanks to his anthemic tune “The Weary Kind,” the Oscar-winning theme song from Crazy Heart, the breakout film bringing Montecitan Jeff Bridges back into career focus, and then again has sung (and acted) in TV’s Yellowstone, the vehicle for Padaro Laner Kevin Costner.

Show biz links aside, Bingham, the New Mexico–born turned L.A. cowboy, has a lot going for him in purely musical terms, as a strong songwriter who uses his gruff-but-loveable voice well and boasts a potent band in the Texas Gentlemen. It’s possible that his recent small screen fame and glitz has nudged up his marketability and crowd share. He played with his former band the Dead Horses at the Maverick Saloon’s “Tales from the Tavern” series just after the Crazy Heart phenom and at the Bowl post-Yellowstone. But the oddly distracted and chattering general admission crowd may have been partly stocked with TV fans versus the musical kind.

Nevertheless, Bingham put on a varied and impressive hoedown of a show at the Bowl on June 14. The two-set show swerved smoothly through shades of Americana, country-rock band workouts, and sharply-penned country-folk songs with touches of Townes Van Zandt and Steve Earle in the margins.

Bingham and band can cook up a steamy southern-rock groove at times, but some of his most impressive tunes are more understated, including his Mescalito-era bluegrass-stained “Sunrise” (with his wife Hassie Harrison sitting in on vocals), “Wolves” (from 2019’s American Love Song) and the moving Bingham gem “Hallelujah.”

When the setlist roulette wheel inevitably landed on “The Weary Kind,” Bingham shifted gears slyly from an understated acoustic section into a surprise detour to some back porch psychedelia with the band.

After closing the second set with the bluegrass-fortified “Southside of Heaven” — ending with the first track of his debut album, Bingham returned for an encore of the loopy hit “Nobody Knows My Trouble.” Yes, he’s had troubles — including tragic circumstances with his alcoholic mother and suicidal father early on — and has worn an assortment of hats over his close to two decades in the limelight, but Bingham seems anything but weary. He fully showed up at the Bowl.

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