Until recently, the “discography” section of Charley Crockett’s Wikipedia page was a vision of DIY purity: 14 albums (including a live one) in about nine years, all released independently via Son of Davy, the Texas singer-songwriter’s own record label. In January, however, Crockett announced that his 15th record and $10 Cowboy follow-up, Lonesome Drifter, would be his first for major label giant Island Records. “I fell into this troubadour life looking for a way to live on my own terms,” he wrote. “I didn’t like the idea of being fenced in, sold off, or played out.”
It’s hard to imagine a restless soul like Crockett letting anyone tell him what he can or cannot do, and it only takes about four minutes of listening to Lonesome Drifter to hear him bristling just a bit against his new business arrangement. The album’s second track, “Game I Can’t Win,” is a smooth, classic country tune with strong forward momentum and a trio of stanzas that go like this:
Them boys in Nashville, they don’t mess around
Better watch ‘em when your deal goes down
Gotta play along, let ‘em lead you by the hand
And they love it when you don’t understand
You didn’t hear it from me
They can’t stand to see you free
Self-reliance and a healthy suspicion of The Man have long been recurring themes in Charley Crockett’s songs, which invariably land near the borderlines between country, folk, blues and soul. It’s a sound that aligns perfectly with his background, a hazy tale of train-hopping, street corner busking, highway miles and, more recently, sold-out amphitheaters and auditoriums. And it’s easy to hear why so many people are buying tickets: Lonesome Drifter continues Crockett’s white hot run of records that sound great and are remarkably even-keeled. In this way, he’s like the twangy version of his fellow Texans in Khruangbin: ultra-consistent, highly listenable and effortlessly cool.
Take, for example, the album’s title track, a blue-collar shout-out set to a laid-back but sinister groove that sounds like the theme song to The Sopranos: Sweltering Texas Summer; or “One Trick Pony,” a deep track with unsettling confidence and an old soul, thanks to Anthony Farrell’s transportive work on the organ; or the various points throughout the album—”Easy Money” and “Life Of A Country Singer,” especially—where Stephen Barber’s tasteful string arrangements lend Crockett’s gritty stories a cinematic feel. In the latter, when he sings, “Rolling slow down an empty Houston highway / Not a care in the world on earth where it goes” in his syrupy drawl, you can probably ride shotgun with your feet up on the dash if you just squint hard enough.
Elsewhere, Crockett explores every corner of his self-made lane, going full honky tonk (“Jamestown Ferry”), diving deep into a bluesy love song (“Never No More”), spinning Spaghetti Western gold out of murder (“The Death of Bill Bailey”) and putting his own slinky take on a folksy ramble (“Night Rider”). His closer—a faithful cover of the George Strait hit “Amarillo By Morning”—pays tribute to a Lone Star State classic, even as Crockett makes it his own by adding a mournful horn part and more beautiful strings to the mix.
On March 7, Crockett announced that he’ll give away 100,000 copies of a four-song CD sampler ahead of Lonesome Drifter’s release to echo how he got his start: handing out CDs of his self-released debut A Stolen Jewel in Dallas. That’s a fun promotional stunt, but it’s also strong evidence that you can take the man out of DIY spaces, but you can’t take the DIY mindset out of the man. Breathe easy, fans: It’s going to take more than the machinations of a multinational corporation to change Charley Crockett.
Ben Salmon is a committed night owl with an undying devotion to discovering new music. He lives in the great state of Oregon, where he hosts a killer radio show and obsesses about Kentucky basketball from afar. Ben has been writing about music for more than two decades, sometimes for websites you’ve heard of but more often for alt-weekly papers in cities across the country. Follow him on Twitter at @bcsalmon.
