CHARLIE CROCKETT : LONESOME DRIFTER

1. Lonesome Drifter
2. Game I Can't Win
3. Jamestown Ferry
4. Easy Money
5. Under Neon Lights
6. This Crazy Life
7. The Death Of Bill Bailey
8. Never No More
9. Life Of A Country Singer
10. One Trick Pony
11. Night Rider
12. Amarillo By Morning

Label : Lone Star Rider

Release Date : March 14, 2025

Length : 38:10

Review (Pitchfork) : Consider the drifter. Is he not, in some meaningful way, sadder than his nearest points of comparison, the rambler and the gambler? The gambler has an addiction to gambling and the rambler has ants in his pants. But the drifter—he just drifts. That’s some lowdown, harrowing, no-agenda-left-save-for-dying shit. Hank Williams understood this. That’s why he adopted the persona Luke the Drifter in 1953, to record some of the most piteously sad songs ever written. Ascendant Texas-born country singer Charley Crockett knows it too. He’s seen a lot over the course of a slow-burning decade-long career, and he spills a whole highway full of guts on his newest LP, Lonesome Drifter. Lonesome Drifter’s lead-off title track is a menacing shot across the bow. Over a shuffling groove gleefully splitting the difference between Dylan’s “Solid Rock” and the Allmans’ “Midnight Rider,” Crockett vituperatively disclaims: “Everybody’s working in them cotton fields, just a little bit different than they used to feel.” It’s a jolting, anxious moment—the nervous invocation of cotton fields, the sort of thing that would turn up in Randy Newman’s subversive imagination. The song trucks along, untroubled. “I’m just a lonesome drifter on the only highway.” Still. With these gas prices? I would love to report that things improve for our narrator, but trouble for the troubadour is not a voluntary opt-out. The second track, “Game I Can’t Win,” is a Waylon-worthy pissed-off Nashville litany of false promises and bounced checks abetted by Burrito Brothers pedal steel. As a craftsman, Crockett has become admirably adroit. Plenty of songs on Lonesome Drifter tell multi-layered stories, but the longest one stretches barely beyond three-and-a-half minutes. The laudable economy of language resembles his fellow Texan Townes Van Zandt. So, for the most part, does the mood. The downward trajectory traced on “Under the Neon Lights” would not only disappoint Crockett’s own mother, but Merle Haggard’s too. The gloriously peak-bummer Kristofferson-style “This Crazy Life” makes absolutely no attempt to make sense of the singer’s crazy life, but does offer the irresistible olive branch: “Darling, you know I care for you/Though I’m not too good with love.” The “too” does a lot of work. Hang around the bad part of town enough, and you might meet a guy like Crockett. “Never No More” resembles nothing so much as fellow trickster Tom Waits’ 1976 Crayola noir Small Change. “One Trick Pony” grabs the title from Paul Simon’s acerbic 1980 music satire either by osmosis or deep cinema habits. Doesn’t strictly matter. “I’m bound to tell the truth the way that gamblers rarely do,” Crockett snarls. “They be tying up your noose and calling you friend.” With friends like that, who needs hangmen? Maybe it isn’t a coincidence that being a one trick pony might be a criticism leveled against him. Having run the functional stations of the country singer cross on side one—highway blindness, bankruptcy, broken hearts, extensive fraud—Crockett elects to take the tour again on side two. The drifter trip is a Mobius strip. All these hard-won lessons—why not just quit? Things do get agreeably weirder. “The Death of Bill Bailey” is a murder song, full of twists and asides. “Never No More” achieves the outside edges of credible Al Green funkiness. “Life of a Country Singer” is a welcome addition to the genre’s obsessive fear that Jimmie Rodgers or Hank or Merle or Tom T. Hall can never be replaced. The beautifully faithful closing cover of George Strait’s standard “Amarillo by Morning” demonstrates that those ghosts will always be chasing him. Like Elvis Costello before him, the 40-year-old Crockett seems both talent-wise and generationally well-placed to build a bridge between genres through the sheer force of his writing. And so it goes through 38 exhilaratingly coiled-up minutes of ramshackle glories and ritually sanctioned self-harm. Consider the drifter’s predicament. Another thing you might call them is a migrant. Flush with doubt and humanity, Lonesome Drifter is a downbeat twist on the great Robert Earl Keen’s liturgical formulation: The road goes on forever. The nightmare never ends.

Review (Paste Magazine) : Until recently, the “discography” section of Charley Crockett’s Wikipedia page was a vision of DIY purity: 14 albums (including a live one) in about nine years, all released independently via Son of Davy, the Texas singer-songwriter’s own record label. In January, however, Crockett announced that his 15th record and $10 Cowboy follow-up, Lonesome Drifter, would be his first for major label giant Island Records. “I fell into this troubadour life looking for a way to live on my own terms,” he wrote. “I didn’t like the idea of being fenced in, sold off, or played out.” It’s hard to imagine a restless soul like Crockett letting anyone tell him what he can or cannot do, and it only takes about four minutes of listening to Lonesome Drifter to hear him bristling just a bit against his new business arrangement. The album’s second track, “Game I Can’t Win,” is a smooth, classic country tune with strong forward momentum and a trio of stanzas that go like this: Them boys in Nashville, they don’t mess around Better watch ‘em when your deal goes down Gotta play along, let ‘em lead you by the hand And they love it when you don’t understand You didn’t hear it from me They can’t stand to see you free Self-reliance and a healthy suspicion of The Man have long been recurring themes in Charley Crockett’s songs, which invariably land near the borderlines between country, folk, blues and soul. It’s a sound that aligns perfectly with his background, a hazy tale of train-hopping, street corner busking, highway miles and, more recently, sold-out amphitheaters and auditoriums. And it’s easy to hear why so many people are buying tickets: Lonesome Drifter continues Crockett’s white hot run of records that sound great and are remarkably even-keeled. In this way, he’s like the twangy version of his fellow Texans in Khruangbin: ultra-consistent, highly listenable and effortlessly cool. Take, for example, the album’s title track, a blue-collar shout-out set to a laid-back but sinister groove that sounds like the theme song to The Sopranos: Sweltering Texas Summer; or “One Trick Pony,” a deep track with unsettling confidence and an old soul, thanks to Anthony Farrell’s transportive work on the organ; or the various points throughout the album—”Easy Money” and “Life Of A Country Singer,” especially—where Stephen Barber’s tasteful string arrangements lend Crockett’s gritty stories a cinematic feel. In the latter, when he sings, “Rolling slow down an empty Houston highway / Not a care in the world on earth where it goes” in his syrupy drawl, you can probably ride shotgun with your feet up on the dash if you just squint hard enough. Elsewhere, Crockett explores every corner of his self-made lane, going full honky tonk (“Jamestown Ferry”), diving deep into a bluesy love song (“Never No More”), spinning Spaghetti Western gold out of murder (“The Death of Bill Bailey”) and putting his own slinky take on a folksy ramble (“Night Rider”). His closer—a faithful cover of the George Strait hit “Amarillo By Morning”—pays tribute to a Lone Star State classic, even as Crockett makes it his own by adding a mournful horn part and more beautiful strings to the mix. On March 7, Crockett announced that he’ll give away 100,000 copies of a four-song CD sampler ahead of Lonesome Drifter’s release to echo how he got his start: handing out CDs of his self-released debut A Stolen Jewel in Dallas. That’s a fun promotional stunt, but it’s also strong evidence that you can take the man out of DIY spaces, but you can’t take the DIY mindset out of the man. Breathe easy, fans: It’s going to take more than the machinations of a multinational corporation to change Charley Crockett.

Review (Album Of The Year) : Since hearing both of his albums last year, I thought Charley Crockett had potential to be one of the strongest voices in modern country, even if his music is slightly carried by its old world charm. Lonesome Drifter is exactly the improvement that I could have hoped for and then some, because this is 12 perfectly crafted country tunes that are rustic and pure with Charley's best songwriting, storytelling, and versatility to date. There is a great balance of progressive country, Southern soul ballads, and country rockers, where Charley's fantastic vocals and stories are on full display over some impressive instrumental variety. I like the classic outlaw country influence on songs like the title track or "The Death of Bill Bailey", where Charley plays the role of friendly highwayman recounting his tales of the old west. This is still not the most versatile album out there, but he mostly makes up for this part that was kind of lacking on his past work with the instrumental diversity, even kind of poking fun at this on "One Trick Pony". I love the saloon organs on "Under Neon Lights", the banjo sections on "Game I Can't Win", and the lush strings on "Easy Money" and "This Crazy Life", where they get especially dense and cinematic as the latter progresses. There are also a couple of amazing covers, with a big band twist with the horn orchestrations on Charley's rendition of "Jamestown Ferry", while his version of "Amarillo By Morning" is a fantastic closer. Lonesome Drifter is a pretty incredible country album, with a tight 38 minute length as well, leading to one well-written and performed original or cover after the other. There were a couple of semi-weaker tracks, but the production and songwriting were consistently great on every song with a wide array of stories covered, and not only do I think this will easily be one of the best country records or the year, but one of the better in the genre of this decade when the time comes. Favorite tracks: "Under Neon Lights", "Lonesome Drifter", "Amarillo By Morning", "Jamestown Ferry", "Easy Money", "This Crazy Life", "The Death of Bill Bailey", "Life of a Country Singer", "One Trick Pony", "Game I Can't Win". Least favorite tracks: "Night Rider"