Turnpike Troubadours Come Back from the Dark

On their seventh album, the Tulsa troupe confirms their stature as a country-rock band without peer... and as sensitive chroniclers of mature masculinity.

Turnpike Troubadours - The Price of Admission

Evan Felker is the poet laureate of grown man shit. His songs cover all of it— fathers and sons, husbands and wives, addiction and recovery, work and pleasure, failure and grace— with mature masculinity and a vulnerability that never curdles into self-hatred. He is everything that people praise Jason Isbell for being; he is Zach Bryan with greater depth and a more exacting craft.

There is grown man shit aplenty on The Price of Admission, the seventh album Felker has released with his beloved band Turnpike Troubadours. This album follows A Cat in the Rain, the group’s comeback following Felker’s admission to rehab for substance use issues— a personal trial that nearly destroyed his band and his marriage. The songs on that album were rich in imagery of prodigals returning home, of unlikely redemption and reconciliation— and the lyrics on this new album suggest that Felker is still coming to grips with what it means to be saved. “Come back from the dark somehow/ finally living in the here and now,” he sings on “Heaven Passing Through,” immediately one of the crown jewels of the Turnpike songbook. The rest of the album bears witness: coming out of the darkness— receiving the slow work of grace as an antidote to regret— is an ongoing process.

For the second album in a row, the Troubadours work with producer Shooter Jennings, who captures the ease of the band’s interplay, their lived-in grace and intimacy. Just as age and experience have deepened Felker’s writing, the band’s veteran status suits them well— their craft is marked by quiet confidence, greater assurance than ever before. “On the Red River” opens the album on an unhurried note, and even when the group stretches out for loose-limbed rockers in the album’s back half, they mostly avoid the stomp and frenzy of classics like “The Mercury” and “Before the Devil Knows We’re Dead”— this is a band that no longer sounds like they have to prove themselves, which frees them to simply savor the contours of each song.

That’s not to say the album wants for energy— as arresting as Felker’s backstory has become, Turnpike remains a true band, not a glorified solo project. After the album’s elegiac opening, The Price of Admission finds the group exhibiting a casual virtuosity— they deliver one of their twangiest honky-tonk singalongs (“Searching for a Light”), one of their punchiest roots-rockers "(“Ruby Ann”), and— on the closing “Nothing You Can Do”— a rambunctious approximation of Bob Dylan’s mid-60s mayhem.

That quiet confidence extends to the group’s open-hearted approach to collaboration, particularly in their songwriting. Like A Cat in the Rain, The Price of Admission is at least partly about learning to accept assistance, so it’s only fitting that Felker enlists a number of peers to help shoulder his burden, including John Fullbright, Old Crow Medicine Show's Ketch Secor, and Dave Simonett of Trampled By Turtles. His bandmates, Kyle Nix and RC Edwards, also get their own bylines— and it’s a testament to the band’s cohesion that all of these collaborators help to deepen Felker’s thematic interests. They’re all in the grown man shit together.

As is so often the case on Turnpike Troubadours albums, a hunting trip provides the pretext for some of Felker’s most vulnerable moments. Like “The Bird Hunters” and “The Rut” before it, “On the Red River” is a short story about outdoor sport and male camaraderie— but its undercurrents run deep and sorrowful. Set to some of the band’s most sensitive, quietly majestic playing, Felker sings about fathers, sons, and the inevitable passage of time. He recalls the innocence of childhood— “when your daddy wouldn’t ever grow old”— and arrives at hard-won appreciation of family legacies: “when you live like we do, death doesn’t leave with the best part of you.”

But Felker has never been one for uncomplicated sentimentality, and while “On the Red River” is earnest in its familial affection, it also hints at the darker side of family legacies. After all, Felker has been transparent about his struggles with alcohol— so it’s surely meaningful that the narrator devotes a verse to his old man’s taste for drink, observing without rendering judgment: “You’d call it a cure for a snake bite/ and reach for a fifth of Old Crow.”

Recovery is a big part of Felker’s story, and The Price of Admission touches on it with candor, gravitas, and— ocassionally— surprising humor. With its call-and-response lyrics and ragged fiddle, “Be Here” can’t help but sound like a drinking tune, a wistful touch for a song that considers the fraught road to sobriety. It’s hard to pick a favorite of the six rowdy verses, which move from reluctance to wisdom— but a turning point seems to be the verse about Felker’s roommate, sharing stories about nearly being blown to smithereens in Iraq. “I guess I’ve had it easy,” Felker admits.

If A Cat in the Rain was an album about Felker almost blowing up his own life, only to receive a surprising second chance, The Price of Admission is frequently concerned with regret— owning up to failure but not allowing it to swallow up joy and gratitude. In “What Was Advertised,” Felker speaks from a place of grizzled experience, acknowledging all the bets he placed on pleasure— and how little they’ve paid off. Like Bono, he still hasn’t found what he’s looking for— or as he puts it, “Still I’ve yet to see what was advertised to me.”

Elsewhere, Felker acknowledges that a part of him prefers self-pity— yet he resolves to put it behind him. A final verse in “Searching for the Light” could serve as the album’s mission statement: “Well I could spend a lifetime making something out of sorrow/ But I will not trade tomorrow for a pain I feel today.” Later, in the swaggering “A Lie Agreed Upon,” he wonders if “people can start again and be brand new”— and if he doesn’t quite believe it, you can tell that he wants to.

Death looms large on this album— the first two songs both seem to be about sons losing fathers— but in “Heaven Passing Through,” the magnificent tearjerker at the album’s center, Felker again sings about choosing gratitude over regret. The three verses seem to detail three different relationships, each sure to end in sorrow— but Felker’s learned the hard way to be thankful for what’s here and now.

The Great Deceiver might have it otherwise— in a rampaging fiddle-dance called “The Devil Plies His Trade,” Felker retells Genesis 3 from the vantage point of The Screwtape Letters, imagining the Evil One making a lethally simple sales pitch: “Remember, you aren’t guaranteed a second time around.”

What makes that line so resonant is that Felker’s someone who has been gifted a second time around— he’s now made two albums in a row about being the recipient of unexpected mercy, surprising redemption, unfathomable grace. Maybe that’s why he and his bandmates end The Price of Admission with a rowdy Nix original, “Nothing you Can Do”— a whirling slice of absurdism that punctures the mythology of self-empowerment. At its heart, the song is about learning to rest and receive— lessons to which The Price of Admission bears beautiful witness.

My rating: 9 out of 10.