The title character of Dylan LeBlanc’s Coyote is going through it. He’s worked for a cartel, done some drugs, been to prison — now he’s on the lam, trying to avoid arrest and reunite with his lover on the straight and narrow path.
LeBlanc left his fans with a cliffhanger on the 2023 album’s final song, “The Outside,” which found Coyote and his girlfriend driving a stolen Camaro toward the Mexican border only to be stopped by a police roadblock. The song ends with our anti-hero grabbing his gun, unsure of his next move, his fate up in the air.
It turns out LeBlanc never intended to leave listeners hanging for long. Now as he begins a fall tour, the 34-year-old songwriter is tying up loose ends with a deluxe album including four additional songs that pick up where the original LP left off.
“I kind of [knew] this was going to be part of the plan,” LeBlanc says. “Just put out the rest of it and sort of tidy things up.”
The saga of Coyote began to take shape when LeBlanc wrote the album’s opening title track. “America gets loaded / While Juarez rolls the dice,” he sings across a shimmering desertscape of strings and keys. “I put a gun to your head / I’ve got El Paso’s merchandise.”
“It was the first song that I really knew, ‘OK, this is one I’m definitely going to put on the record,’” he says. “As I was writing it, I was seeing the character and I thought, ‘I can really build something with this.’”
‘If you don’t have anything, you don’t have anything to lose’
Dylan LeBlanc drew the story of Coyote from his own lived experience. The singer-guitarist grew up poor in Shreveport, Louisiana, where he fell in with a tough crowd during his teenage years. He stayed out of major trouble, but he saw the appeal of that world.
“I always weigh out the consequences, and usually I can decide pretty quickly: If the consequences are too great, I’m probably not going to even go there,” LeBlanc says. “But I know people who don’t think that way. They’re so desperate to get what they want, and to get what they need, they don’t mind paying the consequences. That’s just desperation … if you don’t have anything, you don’t have anything to lose.”
On top of using his firsthand knowledge in writing Coyote, LeBlanc also drew on his long-running interest in Mexican culture and cartels — along with sordid tales about the Mafia and government corruption, particularly in Louisiana — to color the story.
“It’s more of an internal dialogue on what people on the other side of life and the criminal world probably go through internally, because they’re people, too,” LeBlanc says of the album’s unsavory characters. “They may do bad things, but they do share the burden of the guilt and the sorrow they cause other people.”
High fidelity
LeBlanc himself could have easily drifted down a troubled path, but his love of music helped him avoid that. After his parents split, LeBlanc divided his time between Shreveport and Muscle Shoals, Alabama. Being around his father, a songwriter and touring session musician who frequently worked at the legendary FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals helped nourish LeBlanc’s interest in the artform.
By age 20, LeBlanc had released his debut album, Pauper’s Dream. Then came two more albums, a move up to Dave Matthews’ ATO Records and the release of his 2019 album, Renegade.
Where its predecessor was a mostly plugged-in affair, LeBlanc skewed more acoustic on Coyote, mining his love for 1970s Laurel Canyon country-rock and the “Tulsa sound” of J.J. Cale and Leon Russell.
Concertgoers will hear these influences in full fidelity when LeBlanc takes the stage Oct. 22 in support of The Heavy Heavy at Boulder’s Fox Theatre, where he’ll perform tracks from Coyote alongside a smattering of cuts from his previous albums.
“It’s a very versatile show,” he says. “A lot of it does lean on the heavier side, but we do break it down for the softer stuff, especially from the new album. The band can do both.”
ON THE BILL: The Heavy Heavy with Dylan LeBlanc. 8 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 22, Fox Theatre, 1135 13th St., Boulder. $25
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