Ryan Bingham returns with hopeful album after seven-year break

Ryan Bingham has spent years turning one kind of credibility into another. His new album, They Call Us The Lucky Ones, arrived on May 15 with The Texas Gentlemen, giving him his first full-length release in seven years and his first studio LP since 2019’s American Love Song.

That makes the project more than a return to recording. Bingham said the collaboration felt like he was “part of a band again,” a telling line for an artist who has moved easily between lone-wolf songwriting, screen work and television fame while keeping the same rugged identity in each lane. The new record includes the songs The Lucky Ones and Ballad of The Texas Gentlemen, and it is framed as a more hopeful response to hard times, love and loss.

Bingham’s musical reputation was set long before this album. The Weary Kind, written with T Bone Burnett for Crazy Heart, won the Academy Award for Best Original Song at the 82nd Academy Awards on March 7, 2010. It also won the Golden Globe for Best Original Song in 2010, then took the Grammy for Best Song Written for Motion Picture, Television or Other Visual Media at the 53rd Grammy Awards in February 2011. The same song helped make Bingham the Americana Music Association’s Artist of the Year in 2010, cementing him as one of the era’s most durable roots voices.

His acting work gave that music a wider audience. Bingham began appearing on Yellowstone in 2018 as Walker, the itinerant ranch hand and singer whose presence tied his own catalog to Taylor Sheridan’s Montana-set hit and to the larger cowboy revival in popular culture. In a career built across albums, film and television, Bingham has become a case study in how modern entertainment careers are assembled now: not by choosing one lane, but by proving the same voice can hold across several.