No Trouble For Troubadours

New album, sold-out show for band

Northwest Arkansas (and Oklahoma and Texas) favorites the Turnpike Troubadours welcomed some major changes in preparing for their fourth studio album, “A Long Way From Your Heart”: It was their first experience working with an outside producer, and it is the first album to include steel/accordion player Hank Early.

Grammy Award-winning engineer, mixer and producer Ryan Hewitt (The Avett Brothers, Flogging Molly, Red Hot Chili Peppers) joined the country/rock sextet for the new album, out today, to provide an outside perspective and help “make everything the best version of it possible,” says bassist RC Edwards. “It was like [having] another band member, and then also someone who could take a step away from it maybe more than we could.”

Hewitt’s insight coupled with the added dimension of Early’s instruments — “He’s a very musically talented guy and brought a lot to the table in everything he was involved with” — and the continued depth of the narrative-driven songwriting all combine on “A Long Way From Your Heart” for what Garden & Gun

Magazine calls “the band’s most accessible but richest offering to date.”

“It’s just a continuous growing process — the arrangements are more elaborate, the writing keeps getting better and more intricate, and the playing goes that way too,” Edwards shares. And though the group didn’t set out to make a concept album, “A Long Way From Your Heart” came out leaning on the theme of resilience. “I hope everybody takes home their own thing from, [and] they get the theme of it. That whatever’s going on right now, you’re going to make it. Just keep going. It’s a long way from your heart.”

Photo courtesy David McClister Oklahoma red-dirt country/rock band Turnpike Troubadours returns to George’s Majestic Lounge Saturday for a sold-out show. New album “A Long Way From Your Heart” is out today.