Story Behind the Song: Corb Lund, ’90 Seconds of Your Time’

The first song from Corb Lund's 2019 album Agricultural Tragic is ripped straight from the singer-songwriter's own life. The jangly, upbeat track was inspired by a hunting trip gone wrong.

Rancher and rodeo rider-turned-artist Lund, friend and fellow musician Evan Felker were at the tail end of a 10-day elk-hunting trip in Idaho when their animals went missing -- and the military buddy who was with them wasn't happy. These days, Lund chuckles when he thinks about the ensuing search for the runaway horses and mules, but both his own description of that moment and the lyrics in the third verse of "90 Seconds of Your Time" hint at a more serious concern, about what can happen when veterans return from war.

Read on to learn the story behind "90 Seconds of Your Time," in Lund's own words.

I've got a song called "90 Seconds of Your Time" off of my new record, Agricultural Tragic. [Laughs] And what happened is, we were on a 10-day elk hunt, deep, deep in the mountains of Idaho, with my friend Evan Felker, from Turnpike Troubadours, and on day number eight, we came back from hunting to find that all of our animals had been untied, and they were gone in the middle of nowhere. And we still, to this day, don't know if they came untied or if some territorial hunters untied them, but the chances of four or five of them getting untied on their own is really slim.

So we spent the next two days of the hunt, instead of tracking elk, we were tracking our own horses and mules, and this Army Ranger friend of ours, who was kind of helping us with the hunt, who's kind of better off in the woods [laughs], is walkin' around with a big .44 Magnum, telling us how great it's gonna be to find these animals in somebody else's camp, and he knows this country so well that we could bury these guys and they'll never be found, and so I said, "Kurt, I need 90 seconds of your time, 'cause I need to find out if we're really gonna kill people here, 'cause I don't want to spend the rest of my life in American prison as an accessory to murder." [Laughs]

So, he assured me -- he said, "Oh, we'll just shoot 'em in the leg." [Laughs] So that somehow made it better.

WATCH: Corb Lund Shares the Story Behind "90 Seconds of Your Time"