Bob Weir Escapes to “Gonesville” in His New Cowboy-Inspired Tune

Yesterday Bob Weir premiered the second single from his forthcoming solo album, a track in which he looks to “fly from my troubles” to a place called “Gonesville.”

Weir ran away from home when he was 15 to be a Wyoming cowboy. He bunked at a ranch with older cowboys who spent their evenings singing songs together. “I was the kid with the guitar, so I was the accompaniment,” he said in a recent video interview with TRI Studios LLC. “I learned a bunch of those songs and got steeped in that tradition. It’s a tradition that’s almost gone. I’ve been sort of wondering what to do with that for decades now.”

His solution: a full album of cowboy-inspired music, titled Blue Mountain, to be released at the end of this month. This isn’t Weir’s first foray into performing cowboy music: he sang tunes like “El Paso” and “Jack Straw,” among others, with the Grateful Dead. It is, however, his inaugural effort to make this a theme for an entire body of work.