[title subtitle=”review: Marla Cantrell”][/title]

Turnpike Troubadours: $10

The Turnpike Troubadours, sons of Oklahoma, writers of some of the best country music around, aspired to play at Cain’s Ballroom in Tulsa, and when they finally did they knew they’d arrived. Cain’s is where Bob Wells once played, where Hank Williams played, and for a band from the Sooner State it meant everything to walk onto that stage.

The group plays what’s known as Red Dirt music – soulful, independent music named for the red clay earth of Oklahoma, and of course, Texas. The Turnpike in their name comes from the Indian Turnpike they’ve traveled since birth. And their music, filled with fiddles, guitar, bass, drums, harmonicas and mandolins is as soul shaking as any music I’ve heard lately.

Their newest album, Goodbye Normal Street, is set in the land we know. The town of De Queen and Southwest Arkansas show up on “Good Lord Lorrie.” Oklahoma City makes an appearance on “Gin, Smoke & Lies,” and the CD was produced at 115 Studios in Norman, Oklahoma.

The lyrics, written mostly by frontman Evan Felker, knock you to your knees. “Empty As A Drum” is filled with great lines like, “Well 2 old red-nosed whiskey drunks were talking politics. It was time to hit the bricks. It was time for me to go.” In it a man is waiting, minute by minute for the girl he loves to show up, and she’s late, crazy late, and it’s driving him a little nuts. But she does show up, in the nick of time.

On “Before The Devil Knows We’re Dead,” Evan writes what could be considered a short story in song. He said he read a great deal of short stories while writing this album, and that maybe some of that influenced his work. In this song he tells the story of an eighty-year-old grandfather, hard drinking, hard working, keeping up with the twenty-somethings. The old man bales hay with his younger counterparts and then jumps to oblivion from a cliff into the river below. The storyteller then sings, “Well I’m 28 years old now. I was born in ’84. And I’ve been as free as I can be and I won’t ask for anymore. So let the fiddle player hoedown after I’ve drawn my last breath. But tell everyone I know that I loved them all to death.”

That’s gorgeous writing. And it continues throughout this album, showing up in lines like “You’ve got more than a tattoo up your sleeve,” and “You wrecked it all, you wrecked my heart, you wrecked our house and you wrecked my car.”

There are songs about war, about those who signed up hoping for a tech school degree and ended up writing home from beneath the big Afghan moon. There are songs about cheating, and even a lucky rooster shows up. “A rooster he’s got twenty gals. He’s happy as a lark. He wakes them up in the morning time. Put them all to bed at dark.”

There is a rugged quality to the vocals, rough and raw and true. The accompaniment is perfect, filled with sounds of the South, nights on the porch listening to the guitar, to the fiddle, to a song of lost love, of people trying to find their way, to bad choices that break people apart and the grace that draws them back together again.

The Turnpike Troubadours is a band to follow, and if you’re interested in hearing them live, they’ll be playing at the Arkansas Wakarusa Music Festival on June 7. In the meantime, buy this album. You’ll be glad you did.

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