There's Some Resolution To Be Had”: Turnpike Troubadours Discuss the Future of Lorrie and Jimmy's Journey

In an exclusive interview with Holler before their headline show at Islington Assembly Hall in London, UK, Turnpike Troubadours sat down to chat through their most recent album, songwriting process, and live shows.

One distinct writing style choice for the Oklahoma band has been in their use of characters within their songs - connecting fictional lives that link across albums.

“It’s been very fun. And I think there’s more of that to come,” Evan Felker told Holler when asked about writing character-based songs. Not only has it been fun for the band, but fans love tracing the lives and connecting the dots between Turnpike’s characters, piecing together details that could link up to a bigger story.

Two of the Turnpike community’s favourite characters are Jimmy and Lorrie. First appearing on the 2012 album Goodbye Normal Street, Lorrie is introduced as she "lit a cigarette and smiled and waved the smoke out of her face", what follows is nothing short of an epic love story. Appearing again as the heroine of ‘The Housefire’ on A Long Way From Your Heart, she ‘grabbed the baby, and she made it safe outside’. On 2015’s ‘The Mercury’, Lorrie gets another feature, but this time is seen as the girl that’s ‘gonna wreck this town.’ How does that all piece together though?

Jimmy also features on ‘The Mercury’, ‘dressed up like James Dean’ and the song lets us know that ‘him and Lorrie were a thing.’ On 2010’s ‘The Funeral’, Jimmy takes on a main role, the song kicking off with the lyrics ‘stage right enter Jimmy, just a counterfeit James Dean’, just a couple more snapshots of these characters' lives being revealed.

Exactly which order all of these events come in we’re not too sure, but that’s one of the things Felker loves most about writing. Recalling his experience reading American author Ernest Hemingway’s short story collection about Nick Adams, he mentioned that “it sparks the imagination a little more because you’re painting a picture and figuring out, well, what happened in between there?” Turnpike fans have been doing the same thing for a long time now, and we still don’t have all the answers. 

When asked if stories about Jimmy and Lorrie are in the past now, Felker thought for a moment and then responded, “No, I don’t think so” - an exciting thing to hear for fans of the characters. “There’s only a handful of songs about those characters and their snapshots. I feel like there’s a lot of blanks to fill in there and maybe some resolution to be had on them these days.” 

“I kind of have a rough storyline in my head, so there’s always a good chance of seeing that come back around.” It’s been a couple of albums since we’ve heard about Jimmy and Lorrie, but it sounds like they’re still rocking around in Felker’s mind. “It’s a tricky thing with songs though, because at certain times in your life, you don’t want to put too much feeling into things that are too fictional, because they have a tendency to not resonate as well,” the Oklahoman storyteller explained. “For us, our fictional songs have resonated really well because they’re roughly true stories. So I have to switch gears back and forth between that stuff and hope to not be too confusing.” So really, there’s no saying just how many times we’ll be visited by Jimmy, Lorrie or any of the other characters in the Turnpike universe - their stories can just keep growing.

What about ‘Ruby Ann’ on the new album though? Well, that song was written by R.C. Edwards and co-writer Lance Roarke and that “daisy in the sunrise of the spring” isn’t based on anyone in real life, at least… not in this one. “It was just a name we were kicking around… Roarke’s a bit of a storyteller himself, it’s not a real person or from his home or anything. Kind of a name that worked in with the story we were wanting to tell” R.C. told Holler, “and I think he claims it’s the name of this ghost that lives in his house.” That might be a first for Turnpike, but inspiration can come from anywhere - real person, ghost or entirely fictional.

Here at Holler, we were wondering if Turnpike’s ‘Ruby Ann’ might have been the same girl featured in the Marty Robbins’ song ‘Ruby Ann’, that wasn’t the case, but it did give us an insight into Felker’s own music taste. “It's funny, I think it was on this trip that I was looking through Marty Robbins songs and I realised I'd forgotten about that one,” the songwriter explained. “It's spelled the same way though! I noticed that the other day.”

If we're introduced to some new characters by Turnpike in future songs, there’s just no telling where the inspiration for them could be from. One thing’s for certain though, fans love to investigate and find the links that lie within the songs. Maybe Ruby Ann could even be fitting into the Jimmy and Lorrie story sometime soon?

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