Home is where the ‘Heart’ is
Turnpike Troubadours return to OKC to celebrate release of new album
he Turnpike Troubadours’ new album might be called “A Long Way from Your Heart,” but the root-rockers intend to be close to home, where their heart is, when they unleash it Friday.
The Oklahoma red-dirt standouts will celebrate the release of their latest LP — their fourth or fifth, depending on how you’re counting — with a packed house of home-state fans Friday night at The Criterion, before traveling on to New York, Atlanta, Chicago and other points across the country.
“I want to be in my home state when I’m doing anything big — or at least share those bigger moments with people that got us here,” said lead singer, chief songwriter and guitarist Evan Felker.
Make no mistake, “A Long Way from Your Heart” marks a big moment for the hard-touring Troubadours, who have established a national reputation for their tear-the-roof-off live shows and true-to-life story songs. It’s the follow-up to the band’s 2015 self-titled album, which reached No. 17 overall on the Billboard cross-genre Top 200 list, No. 3 on the Billboard Country Albums Chart, and No. 2 on the Independent Albums Chart.
Of course, since the Troubadours remain a truly independent outfit — the new album will be released on the band’s Bossier City Records with distribution via Thirty Tigers — Felker can view those milestones as accomplishments rather than targets he and his cohorts are obligated to aim for with their “Heart.”
“I don’t really care if this one does as good success-wise. I think it’s a good record. It’s all about just writing my songs and making something that we’re proud of, and that usually in the past has translated into sales or into making our fans happy. And I think it will. I think you can trust yourself sometimes,” Felker said in a recent phone interview from his home in Okemah. “There’s nobody telling me how to do anything really, other than Hewitt.”
New partnerships
That Hewitt is producer Ryan Hewitt, who brought fresh ideas garnered from his work with bands ranging from The Avett Brothers and The Lumineers to Flogging Molly and the Red Hot Chili Peppers to his first outing with the Turnpike Troubadours.
“He’s really professional. He’s got a really great system and just knows music and knows kind of what you’re after and helps you to do a better version of the band and helps step up arrangements. That’s a big part of what old-school producers did was work on arrangements, or say ‘That’s a bad lyric,’ ” Felker said. “When you’ve been a bar band for a while, or you’re getting your sound together … it’s easy to be sort of hardheaded and think you know
what you’re doing, like I thought we did on a lot of the other records (where) we did a great deal more of the arrangements and stuff. These are a bit more interesting, I think.”
Also of interest is that “A Long Way from Your Heart” marks the first album for the Troubadours since adding Hank Early to their full-time lineup. Although he primarily plays pedal steel and accordion, Felker said the newest member also added the dobro to the wistful “Old Time Feeling (Like Before).”
Since chart success doesn’t necessarily drive the Turnpike Troubadours— Felker, fiddler Kyle Nix, steel and electric guitarist Ryan Engleman, bassist RC Edwards, drummer Gabe Pearson and Early— the frontman said they can focus on building a better band on the foundation of their three previous albums (or four, if you include their out-of-print 2007 debut“Bossier City”).
“You always want to expound upon what you’ve done, and you
always want to find new avenues to go down. … But first and foremost, you ask yourself ‘Is this is a song for this band? Does it have the ability to be something that we can play live and that we can enjoy and our fans will enjoy?’ “Felker said.
“Having Ryan on helped because ... he’s a big songselection guy. He culled a lot of stuff that we would have probably used and really pared it down to something that’s nice, distilled it down to something that was drinkable.”
Familiar characters
A markedly richer and headier brew than the band’s previous releases, the new 11-song collection blends fiery barroom rockers with evocative torch songs, all penned in the country sextet’s distinctive narrative style. “Pay No Rent” prettily pays tribute to Felker’s Aunt Lou Johnson, owner of beloved Okemah bar Lou’s Rocky Road Tavern who died last year. Although he didn’t do most of the writing on “Pipe Bomb Dream,” Felker said it is based on a true story of a military veteran who gets in trouble with the local law
selling weed he procured in Colorado. The blazing yarn “The Winding Stair Mountain Blues,” which chronicles the disintegrating friendship between a good guy and his wildchild pal, contains the apt wisdom “The devil’s in the fine details.”
“With any kind of descriptive writing, you have to figure out the sequence of events that would happen and then do your best to get it as correct as you can,” he said. “The details are the main part of it.”
“A Long Way from Your Heart’s” first single and opening track, “The Housefire,” is another vivid story song that not only gets the collection off to a hot start but also provides the album’s intriguing title.
“It’s all about people’s ability to be resilient in tough spots,” Felker said. “I’ve wanted to write a song about the details of an aftermath of a house fire for a long time, because I thought it was poetic knowing folks that have been through it and how they get through things. And it feels like the end of the world, and then it’s not. That’s usually what they’ll tell you, especially if it doesn’t take
everything from them. Material possessions, in the end, aren’t the only thing in the world that makes us happy.”
“The Housefire” also rekindles some familiar characters: plain-spoken country girl Lorrie and the first-person character Felker often embodies. “The man with no name,” as Felker jokingly called him, is still learning from his relationship with Lorrie, which has progressed from the disastrous romance detailed in “Good Lord Lorrie” from the 2012 album “Goodbye Normal Street” and “The Mercury” from 2015’s “Turnpike Troubadours” (and arguably in other tracks, including thefan favorite “The Bird Hunters”).
For the red-dirt group’s growing fan base, the saga of Lorrie and her man have become a kind of countrymusic mythology that, like so much else about the Troubadours, is rooted in the band’s home state.
“I don’t think I’m the first person that’s ever done that by any means, but I think it’s fun for them. I like having it be a broader story with all these characters in the canon,” Felker said.
“It’s useful. I think that there are a lot more layers
to be dug away with more characters that sort of all live in the same universe— or really in the same state and in the same timeline … which always seems to me like landline Oklahoma like if they were adults when I was 16 or something like that. That (pre-cellphone period) is a real sort of romantic era for me to think about how much things have changed and how little they had changed up until that point.”