"Pop country is not sad, as hard as Carrie Underwood tries," laughs Glen Erickson, lead guitarist for local country-rockers The Wheat Pool. "I don’t believe that somebody cheated on her."

Robb Angus, who switches up vocals, guitar, and bass with his brother Mike, finishes the sentence: "She’s dating an NFL quarterback!"

You don’t have to shoot your horse or find your wife in bed with your best friend in order to write good country. Yet a certain element of legitimate heartbreak doesn’t hurt. "I always think that the best music I’ve heard is things that have come out of adversity," says Steph Dagenais, the band’s drummer. "It’s always the stuff that grabs my heart and kicks it around the room a bit."

He’s talking about the rough-hewn rural music of artists like Steve Earle, Neil Young, and their fellow Edmontonians in Old Reliable–all of whom cast a long shadow over The Wheat Pool’s debut CD, Township, which they’re officially unveiling this weekend at a show at Varscona Theatre.

"I think pretty much all the songs [on the disc] are about loss of some kind," says Mike Angus. "Most of them, anyway. They are more about missing people or longing, or those kinds of things, whether it’s a person or a city, or a part of Canada. I think the idea of heartbreak is underlying everything that we do. If you write a sad song, it’s really great–and the only way to make it sadder is to write it more melodically, or really upbeat."

Take the track "FBD (Flowered Blue Dress)," for instance, a bittersweet tale of young love. "It’s a song about a dress, a song about a girl I used to date," says Mike, "and we were pretty terrible together but were too young to know it at the time. It’s basically written about a day we spent together when things were as bad as they could have been, and there was a big part of me that wanted to imagine that things were fine, ’cause she looked great in this fantastic summer dress... It’s basically about being young and stupid and not having the responsibility and maturity to make the right decisions."

Relationships gone sour aren’t the only place The Wheat Pool finds adversity. One of the most heartbreaking songs on the disc (yet, paradoxically, one of the most inspiring) is "Emily Carr," which despite its title has nothing to do with the history of Canadian painting.

"That was a song written about a friend of mine who was a heroin addict living in Vancouver," Mike says. "I spent a weekend with him out there; he took me around, saw the places where he used to get stoned and messed up. He actually survived, he cleaned up, and it was kind of a miracle. Vancouver is a really beautiful city to get to, but for some people like Tim, it’s a terrible city to try to get away from, because there were so many terrible things that kind of haunted him there. He spent some time at the Emily Carr School for the Arts, and Emily Carr was sort of like this figure that kind of was this guardian angel for the whole weekend... When he finally did get out, it was an escape; it’s kind of like a runaway song, with a really sexy Canadian lady."

Is the band fixated on heartbreak? Mike acknowledges there may be some truth in that statement, but says it has nothing to do with being a country band. "If you look at the history of pop music," he says, "it’s the thing that’s been done the most. When you look at old Motown songs, it’s all about heartbreak and falling out of love. It just seems to be a wider easel for art."