Turnpike Troubadours- The Price of Admission
Label: Bossier City
Producer: Shooter Jennings
After nearly giving their cult fanbase a coronary with a four-year hiatus and a six-year gap between recordings, Evan Felker and his beloved indie-country band Turnpike Troubadours made a joyously received return with 2023’s Shooter Jennings-produced, A Cat in the Rain. Now merely twenty months later, the Troubadours have Jennings in tow again and are making up for lost time with their surprise-released follow up, The Price of Admission. The record opens with the devastating “On the Red River”, an immediate threat to Hailey Whitters’ “Casseroles”‘ claim on the most heart-wrenching musical eulogy of the year. Co-written with Ketch Secor of Old Crow Medicine Show, Felker delivers a frankly unflinching and equally moving tribute to the bond between a father and son, and how it carries forward even in death. It will give your throat a lump immediately out of the gates, making for a morose and sobering start to a record, but it is indeed a small price of admission as the gate-keeper to what unfolds as one of the year’s very best country-or-otherwise albums of 2025 thus far.
The album’s second track, “Searching For A Light”, a Felker co-write with John Fullbright, kicks things into a rollicking, unapologetically twangy gear, with the kind of cooly confident vocals and tasty Outlaw-country guitar licks that have not only been trademarks on previous Turnpike outings, but those of classic country records by men like Merle Haggard, and of course their producer’s famous father. It’s this kind of steadfast commitment to their honest and gritty country sound, even as they subtly swayed toward a more polished mainstream production standard, that has rightfully earned the Troubadours one of the most loyal fanbases and some of the most consistent acclaim of the past two decades. And those diehards are rewarded for their loyalty multiple times over through Admission, especially on fiddle-fueled jaunts like “Be Here”, dusty honky-tonk throw-downs like “Ruby Ann”, and a firecracker jam like “The Devil Plies His Trade (Sn 6 Ep 3)” where an intersection of Appalachian bluegrass and blistering country-rock makes for a tremendous full-band showcase. And as ever before, even the more tempo-driven moments benefit from the beautiful dichotomy provided by Felker’s sly, multi-dimensional chops, with the lonesome undertones of his singing never too far out of reach.
Another significant creative development on this record is a collaborative opening within the songwriting muse of Evan Felker that feeds the catalog of the Troubadours. While Felker had previously always penned Turnpike tracks by himself, Admission offers no less than six co-writes in its track list. In addition the Ketch Secor stunner that opened the record and the John Fullbright follow-up, Felker also composes with Trampled By Turtles’ Dave Simonett, Red Dirt upstart Lance Roark, and finally bandmates, Kyle Nix and RC Edwards. One cannot help but feel like this new lane of collaboration reflects the clear-eyed perspective and renewed creativity that Felker clearly possesses in the wake of his newfound sobriety. His writing is no less gripping as it was before, but there is just that intangible element that you can feel in his output tethered to this new life phase, not unlike the turning-point we saw from Jason Isbell from Southeastern onward. This is most evident in moments like the solo-penned standout, “Heaven Passing Through”, dripping with a resonant gratitude, romance, and willingness to let go of one’s selfish and self-destructive tendencies.
It’s also refreshing to see band-members like Nix and Edwards get the opportunity to let their compositional skills shine as well, and they and the remaining musicians (Ryan Engleman, Hank Early, and Gabriel Pearson) in the band’s line-up once again deliver an onslaught of top-shelf picking and playing throughout. The fiddle riffs, Telecaster licks, and especially the increased presence of steel-guitar fills are as positively electrifying as any prior Turnpike LP, with Jennings providing ample room for them all to shine.
Their six-year drought of recordings may have been a painful one, but with the arrival of The Price of Admission, it feels safe to declare that the Turnpike Troubadours are back and remain at peak form. It appears that they’re officially settled back into another tear of unleashing some of the very best country music of the present moment. They remain contemporary country music’s best-kept secret, much like they have been for the majority of the past fifteen years. That certainly deserves to change with this record as much as it did their previous five. But whether it does or not doesn’t really matter, the Troubadours are going to keep doing their thing, and doing it better than damn near anyone else in the game today.
Track List:
- “On the Red River” (Evan Felker, Ketch Secor)
- “Searching For A Light” (Felker, John Fullbright)
- “Forgiving You” (Felker)
- “Be Here” (Felker)
- “Heaven Passing Through” (Felker)
- “The Devil Plies His Trade (Sn 6 Ep 3) (Felker, Kyle Nix)
- “A Lie Ageed Upon” (Felker)
- “Ruby Ann” (Felker, RC Edwards, Lance Roark)
- “What Was Advertised” (Felker)
- “Leaving Town (Woody Guthrie Festival)” (Felker, David Simonett)
- “Nothing You Can Do” (Felker, Nix)
The 706 
Leave a comment