In the year since Ian Munsick last released a studio album, he has put his career through a near-wholesale reset. He’s an independent artist now, working under his own label for the first time. In mid-September, he opened his own Western-themed bar, about
as far from Nashville’s Lower Broadway — the conventional home for such enterprises — as he can get. And, to hear Munsick tell it, he’s never been more at peace since he dropped his new album, The Mountain Goat, last month.
“I’ve been asking people their favorite tune on there, and getting all kinds of answers,” the Wyoming native tells Rolling Stone. “Every tune on the album is hit multiple times. That’s always been my goal, to create a no-skip album that, from top to bottom, you can just press play and forget about your life for an hour.”
Munsick released The Mountain Goat on Aug. 21 on his own West to the Rest Records, in partnership with the Triple Tigers label — his first independent venture after releasing three albums via Warner Records. The album features 15 tracks, of which 13 are original tunes co-written by Munsick, heavily bent toward the American West and its native culture. A pair of instrumental interludes rounds out the record.
The Mountain Goat finds Munsick playing it straight, with his voice front-and-center over melodies that are simple and stripped-down, especially in comparison to his 2025 project, Eagle Feather. The record still has the pop edge that has defined Munsick’s sound thus far, but if there were such a term as “roots pop,” that’s where this record would be found. Munsick chalks it up to the production process — he co-produced the album with Jeremy Spillman and Mike Robinson, working remotely out of home studios rather than a major recording space in Nashville, and played nine instruments across the record himself.
“Being with a major label, they have a lot of artists that they’re putting out music on every single week,” Munsick says. “They have a huge team coming up with all these plans, but when it comes down to the nitty-gritty, you don’t always know what you’re going to get. So, the fact that we were able to be extremely active and have an intricate part of the release plan with our new independent label, it feels like a lean, mean operation.”
The first single, “Love Is Blind,” is a heartbreak song with a pop beat and heavy fiddle, hitting three of Munsick’s sweet spots. He followed that with the haunting “World War III,” in which he declares he’s a peaceful man, but adds, “if there ever comes a time they step out of the shadow/and they come for me and mine, I’ll fight and bleed, and I’ll die happily.” In a vacuum, it’s a whiplash following “Love Is Blind,” but it was Munsick’s intention to showcase his musical range with The Mountain Goat.
On “Earn Your Spurs,” Munsick plays mandolin and turns defiant when he sings, “The clothes don’t make the man/you earn your spurs when the cow shit hits the fan.” It’s the hook to a song that could be perceived as a reality check for the boots-and-hat cowboy fashion that’s en vogue right now, or it could be heard as Munsick’s own reply to the corners of country — from social media critics to record labels — that never took to his Western stylings.
“In country music, we obviously have a lot of respect for each other, but man, there’s times when you gotta call it like it is,” Munsick says. “With the background that I have, and with the respect and appreciation I have of the culture and heritage — I just started to notice that a lot of country artists have started to hop on the trend of horses and cowboys, when you know that was never part of their brand previously. It always irked me, just a tiny bit.”
That also explains why, when Munsick decided to open a bar, he eschewed Nashville’s Lower Broadway, where some of the biggest names in country music have branded honky-tonks, for a quintessentially-Western locale: Deadwood, South Dakota.
In September, while Munsick headlined the Deadwood Jam festival downtown, he and his wife, Caroline, officially opened Ian Musnick’s Cowboy Bar & Western Grill, a saloon with indoor and outdoor performance stages on the grounds of the Landmark Hotel & Casino.
“Having a cowboy bar on Broadway wouldn’t be a cowboy bar at all,” he says. “I’ve been in enough cowboy bars in my life to know that if you’re going to call it a cowboy bar, it better be a damn cowboy bar. Being in Deadwood, it already had that vibe.”
Munsick has a run of headlining shows through the fall, largely through the Midwest, culminating in a November show at Billy Bob’s Texas in Fort Worth. Of the late-summer collision of touring, new album, and opening a bar, Munsick says it’s all just fodder for creativity.
“The goal is to always make music that I want to listen to, man,” Munsick says. “I feel like, if you do that, even if other people don’t like it, it doesn’t matter.”
Josh Crutchmer is a journalist and author whose upcoming book, Sonoran Sounds, is set for release in March 2027 via Back Lounge Publishing.
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