"We’re Just Grateful to Be Here": Turnpike Troubadours Are Living Their Next Chapter

On a Friday at the end of June, in the sweltering heat of a rare British summer, Turnpike Troubadours were on their way to London.

Hearing from their tour manager, the band were about ten minutes away, but “a bus in London can slow that down”. Anyone that knows London will immediately agree with that statement. Anyone that knows Turnpike, well… they’ll be in shock that the band is finally back in the UK at all.

“It’s easier now and life’s better than it used to be. We’re just grateful to be here,” Evan Felker tells me, at ease in a theatre hall dressing room in Islington while looking like he’s walked straight off his Oklahoma ranch.

Just a few hours away from an 800-capacity show in London, the red-dirt band seamlessly transition from opening for Zach Bryan in front of 60,000 at Phoenix Park in Dublin or performing their Boys From Oklahoma stadium shows with Cross Canadian Ragweed, to playing in more intimate venues. “We try to be present in the room that we're in; we’re a band that is made for a thousand and below seaters. This is our natural habitat.”

With a career spanning twenty years, Turnpike seem more self assured than they ever have before. As the six Oklahoma legends sit relaxed before me, ready to reflect on where they are in this very moment, Felker puts it plainly: “As far as the push and pull of playing big shows to small shows, that's been our entire career. This is nothing new for us."

The night that followed became one of the band’s standout performances, unforgettable for everyone lucky enough to be in that electric room. A look of disbelief swept across the band, as they realized the true reach of their music, propelling them through a charged, impassioned finale of ‘Long Hot Summer Day.’ This momentum continues with the release of their latest album, Price of Admission, which the group reflects on as a natural progression from their comeback album, A Cat in the Rain.

“I feel like this one was a completely different thing,’ Felker ruminates, ‘[Price of Admission] was [us] learning how to have fun again, learning how to trust your gut, and not overthink things.” The album’s wholehearted embrace of both the good and the bad encapsulates the events that have now been cemented in the band’s life, longevity and lore. As Felker graciously opened up about the struggles of the past, there was a distinct air of understanding throughout the room, a silence of support from those with him.

“It’s a special thing… this relationship. Every single part of it, throughout the years, has added or at least made its mark on what we are now,” evidently, the hardships of one member are not only shared, but accepted by the rest of the Oklahoma band. 

Felker’s struggles with alcohol and addiction saw the band take a long hiatus, leaving six years between releases of new music. Leaving a trail of performances and cancelled shows that both band and fans were disappointed with, there was no doubt that the right decision was made for the group, ultimately proving fundamental to their eventual continuation. When they returned, something shifted.

Their sound wasn’t new or transformed, they were still Turnpike - yet, something felt more settled. They had people waiting for them and they understood each other well enough to be able to piece it back together when they returned, “it takes a certain set of circumstances to have six grown guys who’ve known each other and worked together this much to have this relationship,” Felker explains.

Filing into the dressing room one after the other, each offering a hand shake, a “nice to meet you” and (in Felker’s case) a removal of a cowboy hat, there could’ve been an understandable disconnect when speaking with all six Troubadours at the same time. As they sat down, each appreciating my sentiments about what their music means to me and patiently waiting as I pressed record, I realised this wouldn't be the case. 

Turnpike Troubadours are a group - they’ve worked, travelled and gone through the ups and downs of life together. A deep familiarity with the very essence of each other means that when they walk on stage, into a studio or into a dressing room on the other side of the Atlantic, they just make sense to one another. They just click, and on Price of Admission, it’s perhaps more obvious than ever before.

“It’s going to be like a church thing with a hymnal or something, like a lyric sheet when everybody walks in,” the group joke as we talk about the way that ‘Be Here’ is structured; “maybe print the lyrics on the ticket?”, I offer. A chorus of ‘oh lord the road I’m on’ imprints on your listening experience, sparking a warmth that grows with each repetition. The sea-shanty-like track captures not just the pain of Felker’s experience, but the very community that has been upheld by patience, support, and ultimately a love for music. On the studio recording, the band sat together in front of a mic to capture the chorus’ collection of voices, a memory that made the group relax just a little more into the conversation.

“You sang on that one too?” Felker asks Ryan Engleman, with a tone of surprise in his voice, “I got a credit for it” he jokingly acknowledges. A sudden glimpse of what life in the studio must be like takes shape as the group joke around. “Ryan has a lovely singing voice”, Gabe Pearson, keeper of the backbeat on drums, tells me, his voice tinged with the kind of sarcasm that accompanies knowing someone like the back of your hand. “You were whispering, surely,” Felker notions towards Engleman. “I was faking it” he responds, sending a wave of laughter and rolled eyes through the band. There’s no doubt the reason ‘Be Here’ works so well live - even without the lyric sheets -  is because it was recorded with the exact same feeling it conjures.

Throughout their career, Turnpike Troubadours have been known for digging into the difficult stuff. Felker writes verses so personal yet widely accessible that he’s made his way into many a Mount Rushmore of country songwriters. Whether it be on the first listen or the fiftieth, a line will sneak up on you and hit you exactly where it hurts, whether its comforting or just needed. “At one point in time, I didn't have anybody around who had dealt with alcoholism or addiction and come to the other side of it. That’s the reason that I take the time to go through these stories,” the Oklahoman storyteller explains. 

As with all music, we have a choice about how much we take from it and embed those words into our lives, but for Turnpike, their priority is offering an option, one to either follow in the footsteps of Felker in his recovery, or to follow the lines of the words he writes. “That has touched a lot more people’s lives than I realised when I was younger and didn’t know much about it,” he said, reflecting on the darker places he’s been, “I like saying that it’s an option, these things are an option if you don’t like the way things are.”

There’s a reason that we can intensely connect with the words that seem so personal to another’s life. The very best stories are rooted deeply enough in human emotion to have a thread that connects us all, fictional or not. It’s a skill and a writing style choice that Turnpike have carried throughout their music, bringing characters to life, ones that have backstories, heartbreaks, betrayals and babies. They are now near mythical beings that have found their ways in and out of songs, and into people’s lives. “For us, our fictional songs have resonated really well because they’re roughly true stories,” Felker told Holler, “being very personal with it is sometimes the key to it being good or authentic.”

Keen to understand the mind of a writer like Felker in as much as a half hour conversation would allow me, the origins of those characters seemed like a good place to start. “It’s like the Nick Adams stories, the Hemingway stuff where you wouldn’t necessarily read those stories in sequence. Each one would just be a snapshot,” Felker explains as his mind wanders to the greats of American literature. Nicholas Adams was the protagonist of two dozen Hemingway short stories, each one dipping in and out of a young man’s coming of age, the writer placing many of his own experiences into the character. “Eventually they all became compiled and everything’s in chronological order,” Felker says about the stories.

Looking at Turnpike’s discography as a collection, each song suddenly becomes a short story in itself. A track like ‘Good Lord Lorrie’, from 2012’s Goodbye Normal Street stands alone as five-minute epic love story, but when that same sweet girl with ‘black hair brown from the summer sun’ appears again in 2015’s ‘The Mercury’, Lorrie now ‘laughs like she just don’t care’ and ‘her kind of loving is a little like a fist fight.’

These are also snapshots, short stories with the space to contemplate what came in between, and that’s for both listener and writer. “I enjoyed my experience with those [Nick Adams] stories a lot more when the dots weren’t quite put together. It sparks the imagination a little more because you’re painting a picture and figuring out, well, what happened there?” Felker explains. As for taking the same approach to character development in his writing: “It’s been very fun. And I think there’s more of that to come.”

As the conversation moved towards where Turnpike are at present, we agreed that Price of Admission has been embraced by fans old and new like a clean slate. It’s not so much a starting point, or the closing of a chapter - rather a recognition of ‘living in the here and now’, finally. As the band enthusiastically lean into a discussion about the creation of the album, they reminisce with each other as they talk to me, speaking with an immediacy that could’ve placed me in the studio with them. “We don’t really chase the sound or try to do something different. We just do what we do,” Hank Early, the steel guitar player of the group, explains.

Even a six-piece at the peak of musical contentment have their limits though. “I really wanted to keep it close to something that would sound like us live,” Early recalls. “I’m not going to play a banjo and steel guitar on the same song, I would never do that live.” Ultimately, this record was grounded “in the name of simplicity”.

As songs from Price of Admission have found their way into recent setlists, nestled between energy-raising old favourites, the transition has been nothing less than seamless, “there’s not the inadequacy that you get when you’ve overproduced something,” the group explain. When the band sink into stunning tracks like ‘On The Red River’ and ‘Heaven Passing Through’ later that night, the evidence is right in front of me - the new record was made to keep you company on a long drive, and to be heard live with a few hundred other people. Either way, the experiences would be almost identical in sound, and the sentiments would be the same.

So what’s on the horizon for the Turnpike Troubadours? First and foremost, the writing continues. There was no hesitation in the group as to how it would come about either, like clockwork answers of: “follow our instincts”, “make it easy on ourselves”, “repeat the process.” If the writing, release and reception of Price of Admission has taught us anything, it’s that not much is more important than fully experiencing the moment we’re in right now. It’s a headspace that the band are solidly in, and one that seems to be sticking. With one more piece of wisdom from Felker, it looks like their identity is pretty cemented too, “if we find situations where we are at a crossroads, always take the country path”.

Whether that lies in writing, sentiment or sound is perhaps what we’ll come to find out, but there’s no doubt that Turnpike know where their strength lies. With tracks that reach the heart-shattering gentility of a waltz, to cajun honky-tonk stomps, to hard-going rootsy rock, it might seem like the band have spread their wings and explored every corner of country music. To the Oklahoma boys themselves though, they don’t think that’s the case, “I don’t think that we’re pursuing that many different sounds,” Felker says, finding agreement from the rest of the crew, “it might appear that way, but we just play the stuff we like as we go.” 

Fundamentally, the ‘Turnpike Troubadours Sound’ is red dirt. It comes from the very soil in which their roots grow - authentic, rough and ready, inspired - but above all else, its the root from where the six branches of the band’s story have grown. Although they might take little detours along the way, the clearest path has a border of country music and runs straight to the heart of Oklahoma, and it’s the path they’ll keep walking.

That identity might be what keeps me and countless others returning to their music time and time again. I don’t need to be in Oklahoma to recognise its importance on the group - this conversation and the show that follows takes place in London (and we definitely don’t have red dirt here). What sits at the heart of Turnpike’s music can cross state lines, countries, even oceans. That’s authenticity, and there’s no better way to understand somebody than seeing their authentic self.

“This isn’t something we have to do, we really enjoy it. The more we can put out, I think the happier we are, and I think the happier everybody is.” As the final show of their long-anticipated headline UK tour comes to an end, the delivery of ‘Pay No Rent’ is comparable to a church service in small town Oklahoma. ‘Is all this livin meant to be, or a happy accident?’ is thrown to the heavens and beyond, with all the faith that 800 lives in a room can summon.

Accident or not, it’s moments like this that just make living a happier journey. And Turnpike in London? Well that’s meant to be.

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