Consider the drifter. Is he not, in some meaningful way, sadder than his nearest points of comparison, the rambler and the gambler? The gambler has an addiction to gambling and the rambler has ants in his pants. But the drifter—he just drifts. That’s some lowdown, harrowing, no-agenda-left-save-for-dying shit. Hank Williams understood this. That’s why he adopted the persona Luke the Drifter in 1953, to record some of the most piteously sad songs ever written. Ascendant Texas-born country singer Charley Crockett knows it too. He’s seen a lot over the course of a slow-burning decade-long career, and he spills a whole highway full of guts on his newest LP, Lonesome Drifter.
Lonesome Drifter’s lead-off title track is a menacing shot across the bow. Over a shuffling groove gleefully splitting the difference between Dylan’s “Solid Rock” and the Allmans’ “Midnight Rider,” Crockett vituperatively disclaims: “Everybody’s working in them cotton fields, just a little bit different than they used to feel.” It’s a jolting, anxious moment—the nervous invocation of cotton fields, the sort of thing that would turn up in Randy Newman’s subversive imagination. The song trucks along, untroubled. “I’m just a lonesome drifter on the only highway.” Still. With these gas prices?
I would love to report that things improve for our narrator, but trouble for the troubadour is not a voluntary opt-out. The second track, “Game I Can’t Win,” is a Waylon-worthy pissed-off Nashville litany of false promises and bounced checks abetted by Burrito Brothers pedal steel. As a craftsman, Crockett has become admirably adroit. Plenty of songs on Lonesome Drifter tell multi-layered stories, but the longest one stretches barely beyond three-and-a-half minutes. The laudable economy of language resembles his fellow Texan Townes Van Zandt. So, for the most part, does the mood. The downward trajectory traced on “Under the Neon Lights” would not only disappoint Crockett’s own mother, but Merle Haggard’s too. The gloriously peak-bummer Kristofferson-style “This Crazy Life” makes absolutely no attempt to make sense of the singer’s crazy life, but does offer the irresistible olive branch: “Darling, you know I care for you/Though I’m not too good with love.” The “too” does a lot of work.
Hang around the bad part of town enough, and you might meet a guy like Crockett. “Never No More” resembles nothing so much as fellow trickster Tom Waits’ 1976 Crayola noir Small Change. “One Trick Pony” grabs the title from Paul Simon’s acerbic 1980 music satire either by osmosis or deep cinema habits. Doesn’t strictly matter. “I’m bound to tell the truth the way that gamblers rarely do,” Crockett snarls. “They be tying up your noose and calling you friend.” With friends like that, who needs hangmen? Maybe it isn’t a coincidence that being a one trick pony might be a criticism leveled against him.
Having run the functional stations of the country singer cross on side one—highway blindness, bankruptcy, broken hearts, extensive fraud—Crockett elects to take the tour again on side two. The drifter trip is a Mobius strip. All these hard-won lessons—why not just quit? Things do get agreeably weirder. “The Death of Bill Bailey” is a murder song, full of twists and asides. “Never No More” achieves the outside edges of credible Al Green funkiness. “Life of a Country Singer” is a welcome addition to the genre’s obsessive fear that Jimmie Rodgers or Hank or Merle or Tom T. Hall can never be replaced. The beautifully faithful closing cover of George Strait’s standard “Amarillo by Morning” demonstrates that those ghosts will always be chasing him. Like Elvis Costello before him, the 40-year-old Crockett seems both talent-wise and generationally well-placed to build a bridge between genres through the sheer force of his writing. And so it goes through 38 exhilaratingly coiled-up minutes of ramshackle glories and ritually sanctioned self-harm.
Consider the drifter’s predicament. Another thing you might call them is a migrant. Flush with doubt and humanity, Lonesome Drifter is a downbeat twist on the great Robert Earl Keen’s liturgical formulation: The road goes on forever. The nightmare never ends.
