Turnpike Troubadours - The Price Of Admission
(Bossier City Records, 2025)
The tacit recovery from chemical dependency has occasionally led musicians to produce their finest recordings, examples being John Hiatt’s excellent Bring The Family (A&M, 1987) and on-point Slow Turning (A&M, 1988) and Jason Isbell’s paramount Southeastern (Southeastern, 2013) and its follow-up Something More Than Free (Southeastern, 2015). After four years of self-reflection, Evan Felker's return to the Turnpike Troubadours generated much anticipation for the band and their release of Cat In The Rain (Bossier City Records, 2023). While any TT recording is a reason to celebrate, Cat In The Rain fell short, perhaps because of a more restrained production approach.
Felker and the band remedy these quibbles with The Price of Admission, marking a return to the music making of A Long Way From Your Heart (Bossier City Records, 2023). Felker wastes no time in addressing his absence in the opening cut, “On The Red River:”
You'd earned every drink with your labor
And I'd sleep on your front seat 'til 3
And you'd call it a cure for a snake bite
And reach for a fifth of Old Crow
Some medicine should get your head right
When your symptoms were starting to show……Back on the red river, not hard to remember
When your daddy wouldn't ever get old
When I saw the world from up on your shoulders
I remember the view, when you live like we do
Death doesn't leave with the best part of you
If poignantly presented here, Felker sharpens his point on the painfully direct “What Was Advertised:”
The whole thing's upside-down
The lost and never found
I'm gonna sell it by the pound when it's over
Did you dig yourself a hole
With your lack of self-control?
Well, if that ain't rock 'n' roll, I've never seen it
Still I've yet to see what was advertised to me
Well, I need something to go my way
Now, that’s what I’m talkin’ about.
Shooter Jennings’ production of this recording liberated the band to be itself, producing the fine music of its earlier albums.