These days, Sheldon Birnie can be seen straddling with an acoustic guitar and crooning dusty, hard-luck country tales with the Winnipeg band he fronts – the amusingly named six-piece Cheering for the Bad Guy.

A few years ago, however, you would’ve found the 26-year-old power-strumming his way through fast, angry, overdriven punk rock anthems.

“I grew up in small town northern B.C., so country was all around us. I wasn’t particularly fond of it. I listened to mostly punk rock and rock ‘n’ roll,” Birnie said by phone last week from the University of Manitoba where he’s a third-year environmental studies major. “But then, when I sat down and listened to artists like Steve Earle or Townes Van Zandt, I found out they’re probably more hardcore than most punk people I was listening to.”

That realization came to Birnie when he was vagabonding through Canada in 2004, working short stints here and there while touring part-time with the bands he was playing with.

In between tours however, Birnie needed a creative outlet for his musical ideas. With no one else around but his acoustic guitar, he started writing country tunes.

“I found punk and country were very similar, at least the songs I was writing. If I slowed them down, the rhythm translated nicely to your basic Hank Williams style,” he said.

Besides song structures, Birnie found another commonality between the two genres – ideology.

 

“The ideas I found were quite the same in punk as in the outlaw country I liked. Down and out, poor, not making ends meet, drinking a lot and partying seemed to be a similar scene, just a different language,” he mused.

“But as opposed to punk rock, you can get mad at the system, or mad at your situation, without having to be jacked up and pissed off all the time.”

In keeping with that ribald spirit, Birnie derived the name of the band from his love of villains in Western movies.

“The bigger people who are generally portrayed as good guys don’t normally end up being the good guys,” he explained.

Rounded out by Dan Stewart, Daniel Peloquin-Hopfner, Nathan Ham, Ben Moir and Jon Voss, the band’s eponymous self-financed 2008 debut – an old-timey, bucolic-sounding affair – was recorded in a North End basement studio.

And while their songs touch on subjects like low wages and hard travels, Birnie is quick to point out the band is primarily about having fun.

“We try to get people to stop in their tracks and start dancing and drinking. We have a blast playing together and we try to extend that fun to the audience,” he said.

“The songs aren’t mindless party tunes, but we like to infuse them with a bit of fun.”

Published in Volume 64, Number 4 of The Uniter (September 24, 2009)