When Evan Felker got back to making music again with Turnpike Troubadours in 2022, it came with a new sense of balance. On the road, life tended to unfold at night at the microphone, but on his ranch in Central Oklahoma, Felker was up early and working with his hands.
With about 200 cows, his wife, and two small children, he’s living a way of life he rediscovered when the band took a three-year hiatus. The singer-songwriter was ready for that time off from creating and playing music. He put the guitar down and barely picked it up during those years.
“I was sick of it, man. I really didn’t care anything about any of it,” Felker says now of his music career back then. “That’s all I did for 12 to 13 years. And there’s a whole lot of aspects of my life that I got behind on. So I just didn’t really have a lot of interest in it. I was burned out.”
Things had begun to unravel for him in the year leading up to the hiatus—partying too hard, a divorce, cancelled shows, walking away from the band he loved, and then 90 days in rehab. He sings about his rehab experience and leaving the drinking life behind on the moving “Be Here,” from the reunited band’s new album The Price of Admission.
Set to a warm fiddle melody, and sea shanty-style call and response harmony vocals, Felker sings: “I pray deliverance from fear / The only thing I need now.”
When the band’s announced “indefinite hiatus” began in 2019, Felker immediately went to work on a friend’s ranch in Texas, and spent a lot of summer days there building a barbed wire fence. Physical labor wasn’t new to him, but it offered some distance from the life he knew as an acclaimed singer-songwriter. He got sober and remarried his ex-wife, and at the beginning of 2021 their first child, a daughter, was born. A son followed at the end of 2022.
“I stay pretty active and you’ve got plenty to do with your hands, all the stuff that you lack being a traveling musician,” says Felker, 41, who is the son of a cowboy. “I came from a pretty blue-collar background. I worked in a welding shop when I was a kid and then went to tech school. And once I stopped working with my hands, it had a tendency to make a guy like me feel a little bit like an imposter.”
He adds with a laugh, “I’m just laying around being lazy and just drinking beer all day and playing music, you know? So it was something that I was kind of craving. It’s not always fun, but it definitely always has a reward to it.”
That same sense of renewal can be heard on The Price of Admission, the second record since the band returned to action as a leading force in the gritty, authentic “Red Dirt” country genre. Felker felt especially inspired this time around, and their audience has responded in kind. If anything, the band’s reach is only expanding further, with appearances on network TV and high-profile concerts.
The Oklahoma six-piece also includes bassist RC Edwards, fiddler Kyle Nix, lead guitarist Ryan Engleman, drummer Gabriel Pearson, and pedal steel player Hank Early.
“I think we hit our stride again as who we are now,” Felker says on the phone from his ranch. In a few days, he would be back with the band to begin several dates in July and August with Willie Nelson and Bob Dylan on their ongoing Outlaw Music Festival tour.
“We’d been off the road for three or four years. We all had some big changes in our life, and there was a little bit of a curve to figure out how to do what we did before as the people that we are now. And this album felt like really hitting our stride to me—not overthinking things, just being simple, playing something that we love, writing something that we find captivating, and having fun.”
The new album arrived without warning in April, less than a month after it was finished. That was partly in response to the last record, which had a long rollout that he says “was a little bit aggravating to a lot of people” and got an underwhelming response. This time, as independent artists, the band realized they could release music on whatever schedule they liked. So Turnpike dropped the record the same weekend they co-headlined four nights at The Boys From Oklahoma concert series in Stillwater, Oklahoma, playing to more than 200,000 fans in a scene many were calling “the Red Dirt Woodstock.”
The Price of Admission was recorded with Shooter Jennings, the in-demand producer and recording artist, and a second-generation musician as the son of country icons Waylon Jennings and Jessi Colter. It was tracked in Jennings’ Snake Mountain space at Sunset Sound in Los Angeles, the legendary studio complex where generations of albums have been created by artists from Led Zeppelin and Prince to Neil Young and Dolly Parton.
“Honestly, L.A. sounds pretty good when you’re feeding cows in Oklahoma in January, and it’s zero degrees,” says Felker. “Two weeks in L.A. sounds pretty nice.”
It was the band’s second record with Jennings, whose depth of music knowledge fit easily with the organic Turnpike sound, which lands at the crossroads of traditional country, folk and Americana.
“He knows everything about every song and every genre,” says Felker. “You name it, he knows where it was recorded and who did this. And not only that, but he understands why those things are valuable. It’s not just a series of facts. He understands why it gives him that feeling. And that’s a huge asset.”
Felker is the band’s primary songwriter. As ever, the majority of his newest lyrics are fictional, but are often inspired by events and situations he’s witnessed or known. While “Be Here” is from his own life experience in rehab, there is as much truth in a song like album opener “On the Red River,” a spare melancholy tune about family bonds and traditions.
Felker says writing “Be Here” was easy compared to the storytelling within “On the Red River.” A gifted lyricist, Felker sings, “Got a look at 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.”
“Something like ‘On the Red River’ is hard because it’s a bigger story and more moving parts,” Felker explains. He estimates that he worked 40 days on that song alone, “to the point where it had to get finished because I wasn’t ever gonna finish anything else.”
He also doesn’t agree with the notion that songs based on real life have any more power than fictional lyrics. “I don’t know what the fixation is on songs having to be autobiographical,” he argues. “Like, 99.9 percent of all the greatest country songs are fiction.”
Felker was born in Okemah, Oklahoma, the birthplace of Woody Guthrie. By his early 20s, Felker was 90 minutes away in Stillwater, working jobs and trying to play music. Turnpike was co-founded there by Felker and Edwards, and they were soon in a van on the road together. In the early days, Turnpike Troubadours adapted to their surroundings.
“We definitely tried everything, not necessarily in a calculated way,” Felker recalls. “You got a gig at whatever bar you’re playing at, and you see what works. If it’s a place where people two-step in, you play dance songs, and that’s a good thing. We learned at a certain point what worked tempo-wise and rhythm-wise, and even just the overall mood of these songs.”
In those early days, Turnpike Troubadours recorded a low-budget indie album called Bossier City to sell at shows. Felker doesn’t think much of it now, calling it “just a garage tape.” There are no plans to re-release it, but it’s an honorable document of Felker beginning to find his voice. A couple of its songs, title track “Bossier City” and “Easton and Main,” were resurrected for the band’s self-titled 2015 album.
Turnpike Troubadours fully came into focus on their official debut, Diamonds & Gasoline, in 2010. The uptempo “Every Girl” got picked up by country radio in Texas and rose quickly on the local charts. “That changed everything for us,” says Felker. “People started singing along to the songs, and we felt more like we were a real band instead of sort of a cover band or something.”
Except for the band’s hiatus, that feeling never left him. “This is what I love to do, and this is probably the only thing that I feel like sets me apart—to write songs,” he says. “I love to do it.”
After his long break from music, Felker is now looking down the road at what Turnpike Troubadours might still accomplish. After the Willie and Dylan dates, Turnpike Troubadours will be back leading its Wild America Tour in August.
Felker is toying with the idea of writing a concept album with some of the recurring characters from previous songs, or he may simply pick up where they left off with The Price of Admission.
“I’m honestly ready to start writing. We’ve got some stuff kind of laying around that we didn’t get a chance to record this last time,” says Felker, noting that he never doubted his band could get this far. “I’ve always thought it could go further. I’d chalk it up to just pure delusion, but I never quit thinking that.”
