Tom Russell, along with his old saddle-pal Ian Tyson, heads up Cowboy Poetry and Music fest.

It''s 9am on Thursday morning, and Tom Russell is in a hurry. Last night, he did a concert with cowboy poet Paul Zarzyski at the University of Redlands. It was a successful gig, and this morning Russell is paying the price for the party that followed the show.

He''s in a hurry to get off the hotel phone to get back to the university, where he''s scheduled to address a class of students. The topic? Something about leading a life on the road. Even without mentioning hangovers, Russell''s got a ton of stories.

Russell, a headliner of this weekend''s Monterey Cowboy Poetry and Music Festival, grew up in the Topanga Canyon area near Los Angeles--a place where Hollywood''s elite kept weekend ranches, and a favorite place for filming cowboy movies. His dad worked on the ranches, and his brother ultimately pursued a rodeo career.

For Russell, the exposure to cowboy life expressed itself in music.

"I heard all the old stuff, going back to Tex Ritter and Marty Robbins, the old stuff that was really well written," says Russell. "I met Ian Tyson [formerly of the folk duo Ian and Sylvia, now one of the most-respected names in cowboy music] in the 1960s and again in the mid ''80s, when he moved almost strictly to cowboy music. A lot of my songwriting is really going back to recreating some of the old songs I heard."

He says most of his music consists of short stories put to words, and his own life provides the grist for much of the material.

Russell moved to Canada, where he began his musical career playing in small clubs and bars, bounced to New York to write a novel, spent time touring with a midway circus act in Puerto Rico, and went back to New York, where he met up with Grateful Dead songwriter Robert Hunter who got Russell some gigs opening for the Dead (which paved the way for Russell''s growing career as a singer and songwriter).

If these aren''t exactly the experiences normally associated with cowboy life, neither are the songs that Russell crafts. And yet at their heart, there''s an inherent cowboy sensibility to almost all of his songs. Even the ones that don''t have a correlation still echo with the sound of the loner''s life.

On Borderlands, Russell''s most recent album, released in April this year, he sings "California Snow," a song co-written with Dave Alvin. The song tells the story of a Border Patrol agent who finds a Mexican couple who have tried to sneak into the U.S. by way of a mountain pass. The woman has frozen to death but her husband continues to carry her body. But, even as Russell brings the couple''s tragedy home, it becomes an even greater lament about the patrolman''s lost family and dreams.

The album''s leadoff song, "Touch of Evil," is both a tribute to the great Orson Welles'' film and a love song sung by someone watching the embers of love fade. It''s a fitting way to start an album that, Russell says, started out as a way to explore the history of his new hometown, El Paso.

"Borderland had to do with my move from Brooklyn to El Paso and my interest in the history of the land, and the Spanish coming through here. It was all a backdrop for the record--then the breakup with my girlfriend got into it."

As it turned out, the album wound up being more about the borderland between men and women, a frontier that can make the bravest cowpoke lonesome, and which provides plenty of roads for musicians to explore.