Tag: RC Edwards

Taking their name from the Indian Nation Turnpike, a 105-mile parkway stretched across southeastern Oklahoma, having tickled the Billboard 200 with their last album, Goodbye Normal Street, which peaked at #57, the quintet’s eponymous fourth album saw a dramatic breakthrough, reaching #17 on the Hot 100 and going Top 3 on the US country charts. Now getting a release outside their native shores, they should further boost their already substantial UK and European following with their high octane mix of Red Dirt, roots country and rock.

Opening with the slow Cajun waltzing ‘The Bird Hunters’, a song about friendship and returning home, Evan Fekler (who took over from John Fulbright, returning here to contribute banjo, accordion and piano) providing the engaging twangy tenor and storytelling lyrics, it deals with themes of love and loss, always rooted in their home state soil. Harmonica blowing stomper ‘Bossier City’ (revisited from the debut album of the same name) contrasts its lively bounce with a tale of a mill worker blowing his pay on gambling and drink to escape the life he lives, while Danny, the narrator in the first track, resurfaces on the fiddle (Kyle Nix) and steel (Ryan Engleman) bolstered mid-tempo ‘Down Here’ offering support to a friend returning, broke and busted, from the big city. Indeed, the band make a point of having their characters part of the same Turnpike universe, turning up on different songs and different albums. Take ‘The Mercury’, for example, a punchy, guitar riffing rocker with distorted Telecasters that pays tribute to their favourite watering hole, the Mercury Lounge in Tulsa, where the customers have previously been featured in ‘The Funeral’ off Diamonds & Gasoline and ‘Good Lord Lorrie’, from the last album.

They also return to their debut album to revive and musically update ‘Easton & Main’, another going back home number with Gram Parsons/Byrdsian echoes, the lure of the girl back home and the toll of a life on the road that ambition necessitates (“you want something bad you gotta bleed a little for it. You gotta look it in the eye, you gotta call it out by name”) also underpins ‘Long Drive Home’.

On Old 97 cover, ‘Doreen’, they show just how much of a dust storm they can kick up, rattling through its paranoid jealousy lyrics like an express train while the relationship fireworks (“combustible as roman candles“) of ‘Ringing In The Year’ (“cheap champagne don’t know the pain of ringing in the year, wondering if you think of me at all”) is the sort of ringing mid-West guitar folk-rock that makes you want to roll down the windows, crank up the volume and sing to the open sky. But they’re equally at home on the quieter, more reflective numbers as strikingly illustrated by the folksy acoustic ballad ‘A Little Song’ and, penned by bassist RC Edwards, the slow waltzing ‘Fall Out Of Love’ (“why did it wind up so bad, were the good times all that we had? We laughed and we loved, but when push came to shove why did it end up so sad?”). Long may the road rise with them.

Mike Davies