Charley Crockett brought the drama surrounding his 17th studio album, Clovis, to a close on Monday when he announced on social media that the LP will be officially released on Friday via the Atlantic Outpost label. The 14-track Clovis was recorded earlier this year at the Norman Petty Studio in Clovis, New Mexico, with Shooter Jennings producing and Crockett’s band, the Blue Drifters, laying down the music.
“I don’t care if it’s Waylon Jennings or Jimi Hendrix,” Crockett tells Rolling Stone of making the record. “All of my favorite artists, they reach back in the past, they bring it back, and then they do something new with it. I feel that we were able to do that, whether it lands with people or not.”
The release of Clovis back in April proved to be the most controversial of any record in Crockett’s catalog. His previous three albums — those in the “Sagebrush Trilogy” — had been put out by Island Records, with the third album in the trilogy, Age of the Ram, dropping via Island on April 3. Barely three weeks later, Crockett independently released Clovis to streaming platforms via his $10 Cowboy Records. On May 7, the record was removed from all streaming platforms, and both Crockett and Island would later confirm that he had split with the label after Age of the Ram.
Crockett doesn’t go into detail about leaving Island, only to say he’s not harboring any ill will. “You gotta stick to your guns, man. The agents and the lawyers and the label people and all that, I am not here to crucify any of those people. You need them,” he says. “But, fuck, man, once they’re driving, that’s when you’re in trouble. That’s what I mean.”
In Crockett’s Instagram post about Clovis on Monday, he compared the re-release of the album to America’s independence. “On this 250th birthday for America, I’m reminded that freedom is something you continue to fight for. A war that never ends,” he wrote. “Today, we win one battle. Clovis is out 4th of July weekend on Atlantic Outpost. Let’s ride.”
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In an accompanying Instagram story, he wrote, “We got to work right away, found a team that believed in getting this record into people’s hands, and turned it around faster than I thought was possible.”
Crockett had recorded the “Sagebrush Trilogy” in just over a year’s time starting in March 2025, with Jennings at Sunset Sound Studio 3 in Los Angeles. But even with those recordings fresh in his memory, the Norman Petty Studio, with its connections to early rock & roll, especially Buddy Holly, as well as Waylon Jennings — Shooter’s father — appealed to Crockett in a way no other studio has.
“I was out there playing with Shooter when I first got on to the Red Dirt circuit, coming off the street,” Crockett recalls of his career in the early 2010s. “And all those years ago, I never thought it would lead here. Now, he’s one of my best friends. He once said to me, ‘We’re like the industry’s worst nightmare,’ and I said, ‘Well, part of the industry’s worst nightmare.’ There’s a whole other side of it where we were maybe inevitable to be coming together like we did. I just felt so many things that I can’t condense down into one feeling,” Crockett says. “Except for, I knew we were supposed to be there.”
Crockett and Jennings wrote 12 of the songs on Clovis, nearly all of them on site in the studio. Only the instrumental title track, which plays out like a Western, and Johnny Cash’s “Don’t Take Your Guns to Town” qualify as covers. The opening song, “The Hallelujah Trail,” a saga of a cowboy who lives forever, despite death, was the first the men wrote. Crockett says it set the tone for the record.
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“In some ways, I think maybe that he and I wrote the best country songs we could have written in the moment,” Crockett says, “Like ‘Last Night at the Alamo’ or ‘Country Music’ or ‘Image of a Woman,’ and we were peeling them off one after another.”
Opened in 1956, the studio is where most of Buddy Holly’s catalog was recorded, with Petty producing. It’s also where Roy Orbison recorded “Ooby Dooby” and Jimmy Gilmer and the Fireballs recorded “Sugar Shack.” In 1958, one of Holly’s protégés, a young Waylon Jennings, recorded at the studio. As a result, recording Clovis was an intensely personal affair for both Shooter Jennings, and one of Waylon’s biggest present-day admirers, Crockett. The studio closed for recordings in the late 1960s and has been largely preserved in its analog-era state since. Crockett had frequently driven through the town, and past the studio, and the idea of recording there captivated him.
“It didn’t have all that energy of, you know, ten thousand bands flowing through there, because of the idleness of the building,” Crockett says. “That’s one of the reasons I wanted to get in there so bad.”
Jennings was born in Littlefield, Texas, an hour southeast of Clovis. His youth was spent picking cotton in the surrounding plains. In Jennings’ 1996 autobiography, he described his upbringing as “dirt poor, with the floor to prove it,” and said the sound of distant train whistles were constant reminders of where he stood, and the urgent need to escape it. When Crockett passes through now, he focuses on that last part.
“When I have stood out there in Littlefield, or any of those places out there,” he says, “when I think about those trains and those horns blaring, and the way it was so bleak to Waylon, what it makes me think of is the resilience and the hard bark on somebody like that, to come out of that situation and revolutionize country music.”
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He’s also aware that he’s inviting a backlash under the circumstances of Clovis‘ re-release, but he’s prepared for it. To Crockett, it’s just an extension of the “authenticity” discourse that permeates country music, and specifically the part of it where he finds himself accused of cosplaying the genre’s forefathers.
“I’m not embarrassed to say this,” he says. “I am no Jimmie Rodgers. I am not Robert Johnson. I am not fucking Hank Williams. Nobody is. But, I got here the same way they did, for my generation. And when I am judged by the creator, he will know that’s the truth. Whether people like me or not, that’s up to them.”
