The Turnpike Troubadours have never followed any script. Breakthrough albums have been followed by breakups. Triumphant reunions have overcome insurmountable odds. And live shows have been thrilling, once-in-a-lifetime experiences.
Now, just two years since their comeback album, A Cat in the Rain, the Tahlequah, Oklahoma, band delivers yet another helping of the unexpected: the surprise release of The Price of Admission, the group’s most vibrant, piercing album since 2010’s career-defining Diamonds & Gasoline.
Reteaming with Grammy-winning producer Shooter Jennings, who oversaw A Cat in the Rain, the Turnpike Troubadours crafted and recorded 11 new songs for The Price of Admission, reminding fans and peers alike just how it’s done. Songwriter and frontman Evan Felker rises to the occasion, cementing his status as country- rock’s version of Bruce Springsteen. He writes and sings openly and poetically about his sobriety, about loss, and about lighting out in search of something, anything, to fill the void.
For Felker, it’s his band of brothers in Turnpike Troubadours: fiddler Kyle Nix, multi-instrumentalist Hank Early, guitarist Ryan Engleman, bassist RC Edwards, and drummer Gabe Pearson. All of them are at the top of their games on The Price of Admission, refusing to hold on too tightly and letting the music guide them.
“We made these songs intentionally very band-friendly, like if we were going to play them in the backyard,” Felker says. “We got back to how we did things, and it really was a lot of rediscovering who you are. Because somewhere along the way, we forgot we were an independent band and that can we do whatever the fuck we want to. We remembered that there is nothing stopping us.”
Where does this album’s title come from? What, in fact, is The Price of Admission? There’s a saying that “pain is the price of admission,” often to consciousness. I was going through different options for the title and that particular line stuck out to me as having some weight, being captivating, and not misrepresenting anything on this record.
It’s also a phrase used in recovery, right? Correct. I try not to harp too much on the AA stuff, because I think that people find it dull outside of the recovery community. But it’s such a neat line that can be applied to life in general. I was thinking of it in terms of doctoring calves, in a sort of animal husbandry way. “Pain is the price of admission to consciousness” for these beasts that you’re stuck with trying to keep alive.
How does The Price of Admission build on A Cat in the Rain? It’s a very standalone record in a lot of ways. I was really trying to find who I was and what my narrative voice was as a songwriter on A Cat in the Rain, because it was the first one I’d ever done sober and clear-headed. Some stuff manifested itself a little more surreal than I typically would write, but on The Price of Admission, I felt a lot more comfortable in my own skin. It felt a lot more like being 20-something in a room when I was writing Diamonds & Gasoline.
Was there less pressure this time? There was zero pressure. We did this because we wanted to and we set a pretty arbitrary date that, hey, we want to get in the studio and be ahead of the curve. We try to not get too far from the studio in general, in our daily lives, so that we don’t get too rusty. Unintentionally, we went six years in between A Cat in the Rain and our album before that, and it was tough to get back in the studio and figure it out again.
Is it fair to say that A Cat in the Rain was over-planned or even overwritten? Oh, absolutely. The thing was, I couldn’t figure out what I was doing. There were parts of that record that I felt like, “Hey, I’m writing some pretty good stuff here,” but I was looking at it through the wrong lens. I was trying to write lines to impress a songwriter, or to try to show people I was smart or try to impress somebody — which is the complete wrong way to make art. This time, I focused on finding things that were captivating, and that’s my number one thing now: trying to find something that makes me feel strongly one way or another, whether it’s nostalgic or sad or makes me laugh.
How do you find those things now? I’ve got small children, so I get to see the world through their eyes quite a bit. It’s an interesting lens to view the world in, and it makes me think a lot about my own childhood and how my parents felt when I was a small child. I was trying to empathize with that and the situation that we were all in then. My kids have jarred a lot of memories and emotions loose, just watching them go from being tiny babies to kids.
