Singer-songwriter/rancher/father Brenn Hill brings his cowboy ballads to Chamisal.

Just the other day, Brenn Hill was up to his belt buckle in mud, trying to fix a well. That night, he performed his salt-of-the-earth brand of country-western at a saloon close to his cattle ranch in rural Northern Utah.

“I live somewhere between being a songwriter and a rancher, but haven’t really decided what I want to do when I grow up,” Hill says. “My music and my lifestyle are constantly connected.”

The singer-songwriter lives with his wife and three children in the same region of the Northwest that five generations before him lived as full-time ranchers. The only difference: Hill’s also a full-time musician who’s been named Male Vocalist of the Year by the Academy of Western Artists and winner of a Western Music Association Crescendo Award.

Hill recalls sitting around the campfire with family, listening to a tape of Ian Tyson’s Cowboyography on an old cassette player when he was 12.

“That’s when I knew I wanted to be a songwriter,” he says. “It was the culmination of the music and the tall timbre and seven days on horseback.”

Hill’s most recent record Ode to Selway – his 10th album – harkens back to his roots and growing up surrounded by people who have symbiotic relationships with the land. In recent years, as Hill’s had to deal with struggles, including a son who’s a cancer survivor, he finds himself coming full circle, returning to that same wilderness that inspired him to become a songwriter, looking for spiritual rehabilitation. That’s where the songs on Ode to Selway’s ended up coming from. The title track blends the nighttime sounds of the Rocky Mountain West with Hill’s vivid descriptions. In addition to a batch of a dozen originals, Selway features one cover that represents the spark that ignited the musician’s songwriting passion as a 12-year-old boy: Ian Tyson’s classic cowboy-falls-in-love-with-prostitute ballad, “Fifty Years Ago.”

After making nine albums, Hill says that Selway was the most difficult to finish.

“There were hurdles and blips and barriers,” he says. “I think part of that is, as we grew our standards go up and we develop and mature as artists.”

But as he keeps talking, he reveals it goes a little deeper than that, to a more personal place.

“I have to be real to feel good about what I do,” Hill explains. “I have to find the stories. I have to find the people and places that continue to inspire me.”

BRENN HILL 8pm Monday, Sept. 8. The Courtside Bistro at Chamisal Tennis and Fitness Club, 185 Robley Road, Corral de Tierra. $10 donation to Cowboys in the Schools. 484-6000.