Ryan Bingham Reveals New Album “They Call Us the Lucky Ones” Is a 'Nod to a Lot of the Hard Times That We've Had' (Exclusive)

Chris BarillaFri, May 15, 2026 at 1:00 PM UTC

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Ryan Bingham
Credit: Elias Tahan -

Ryan Bingham's new album with The Texas Gentlemen, titled They Call Us the Lucky Ones, was created through spontaneous live improvisation sessions and an effort to "just go jam"

The album embraces imperfection and reflects Bingham's evolving approach to songwriting and balancing life on the road with his personal obligations

Bingham credits The Texas Gentlemen with deepening his sound and creating a collaborative performance dynamic

Ryan Bingham has fully freed himself from the traditional constraints of music making.

On his new album with his band The Texas Gentlemen, titled They Call Us the Lucky Ones, the Southwestern troubadour, 45, leans into a noticeably freer and more organic approach that is wholly informed by the bravado of live improvisation, and steeped in the traditions of American dance halls.

As Bingham recalls, They Call Us the Lucky Ones was far from a meticulously mapped-out studio process. "We literally just … ‘Let's just go jam,' " he says of the sessions with The Texas Gentlemen that ultimately manifested into the record. "We went in for two or three days and recorded some ideas… and then we just did that a few times."

Eventually, he noticed, "We've got a whole album here worth of stuff."

That spontaneity, he maintains, became the defining energy of the record. "We just loved the feeling of how we recorded it just raw and live," Bingham explains. "It felt like we captured a little moment in time there."

'They Call Us The Lucky Ones' by Ryan Bingham and The Texas Gentlemen
Credit: The Bingham Recording Co./Thirty Tigers

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The resulting project embraces imperfection, an ethos Bingham claims to have grown more comfortable with over time. "Sometimes it's like James Brown said, ‘God is in the first take and everything else is manmade,' " he says, citing a philosophy that has guided his and the band's recording process: "Leave it alone. Just leave it."

"Something will come to me ... I'm like, ‘Oh, I need to go… I got to get that out of me.' It's like it's not my choice ... It's like something that's coming through me from somewhere else," he says of the visceral way songwriting strikes him nowadays.

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The album's title carries a layered meaning for the artist, evoking gratitude and grit in equal measure. They Call Us the Lucky Ones is, as he explains, "a nod to a lot of the hard times that we've all gone through together to get to where we're at." By traversing sonic ground across its 10 tracks that transports listeners from the open expanses of Montana to the Mississippi Hill Country, Bingham and The Texas Gentlemen effectively weave a tapestry that knits together a throughline between foundational Americana genres.

Existing at the proverbial emotional center of They Call Us the Lucky Ones is its title track, "The Lucky Ones," which Bingham explains is an exercise in establishing gratitude and recognizing hard-fought perspective. "We're a bunch of misfits, just a bit lucked out," he says of himself and the band. Still, the Yellowstone star is the first one to point out that life only puts out what you put into it. "Harder you work, the luckier you get," he adds, later stating, "It's also a lot of work ... We spend a lot of time on the road away from our families."

As a father of three, a husband to Yellowstone costar Hassie Harrison and a roughly 20-year veteran of the road as a musician, Bingham notes that his perspective on balancing the public and the private sides of his life has evolved in an effort to give both the time and space they need. "I can emotionally prepare for it a lot better than I could when I was younger,” he says.

Ryan Bingham
Credit: Elias Tahan

But no matter how much changes in his day-to-day life, the creative spark remains. "Art and music really just is a reflection of your soul," he notes. "Sometimes I just sit around and I'll go several weeks, I won't even try to write songs … and then something will come to me."

And by teaming up with The Texas Gentlemen, whom he credits with deepening both his sound and his sense of trust onstage, Bingham can finally take some time to "be a passenger on the ship like everybody else," and allow creative decision-making to be a group effort to lessen his load. "I don't have to go up there and run the whole… drive the ship every night," he shares.

Now that Bingham has established that level of trust with a core group of musicians, it has also reshaped how he sees performance as a whole. "I go give them their money's worth," he says of audiences who take time to come to his performances, adding of himself, the band and all musicians, "Once you sign up, you signed up. There ain't no turning back."

"I get to do it with these guys," he gloats of The Texas Gentlemen. "And honestly, if it weren't for this group of guys in the band, I probably wouldn't be doing it so much."

They Call Us the Lucky Ones is out on all major streaming platforms now.

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Source: “AOL Entertainment”