When Jamey Johnson released his label debut The Dollar in 2006, he was a clean-cut hat act still holding onto a little spit shine from his service in the Marines. Two years later, he’d grown out his hair and beard and effectively brought outlaw country — in both look and sound — back to Nashville with the ragged and raw That Lonesome Song. The equally rough-hewn albums that followed, 2010’s double LP The Guitar Song and a 2012 collection of Harlan Howard compositions, suggested Johnson would be a prolific recording artist.
Instead, he all but disappeared from the studio, choosing instead a life on tour. He bought a bus, and later a plane, and drove himself to gigs. Now, 14 years since his last album of original material, the Alabama singer-songwriter returns with Midnight Gasoline. Like his preferred habitat, it’s a road record. The songs, made for late-night drives, are loose and long, often taking their sweet old time getting to their destination. Fortunately, the journey is (mostly) a fun one.
Johnson, always unapologetic in his songwriting (one of his catalog’s best, “Can’t Cash My Checks,” told the tale of a farmer growing weed to get by), co-wrote eight of the album’s 12 tracks, including two that have already received a heaping of attention. “21 Guns” is a salute to a fallen soldier that’ll tug at the heart of anyone who’s lost a family member during one of America’s many wars, while “Sober” sums up Johnson’s attempt to swear off booze in a genre all but steeped in brown liquor: “All these drinking songs we’re playing/make it hard staying sober in this town,” he sings.
Johnson, now 49, possesses one of country music’s most seasoned voices. In “One More Time,” he checks its power as he delves deeper into fantastical regret — a simple desire to hold his lover one more time — before booming, “Then I’d just be playing God!” In “Someday When I’m Old,” a gray-haired love song, he all but whispers and sighs. Johnson gets an assist on a pair of covers from his vocal peer, Randy Houser, and both are Midnight Gasoline highlights. One is a freewheeling take on Charlie Daniels’ 1970 jam “Trudy”; the other, “I’m Tired of It All,” is a peek behind Nashville’s party curtain written by Dallas Davison and Kyle Fishman. “I don’t know when I turned into an outlaw,” Johnson and Houser sing, “but it ain’t working for me.”
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The album really stretches out on “Saturday Night in New Orleans,” a musical travelogue of the Crescent City. Johnson co-wrote the loping song with Chris Stapleton and the late Tony Joe White, and it reeks of White’s swampy blues. Bobby Campo’s trumpet gives it flashes of bright brass, which help stave off monotony (there’s only so much drawling one can take).
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The other fumble is album closer “What You Answer To.” Ostensibly a lighthearted ditty, it pokes fun at gender pronouns in one verse that aims to cast Johnson as a bemused observer — he comes off as dismissive. “She him they them fine whatever Honey/It seems like the whole damned world’s confused/I wish that I could laugh but it ain’t funny,” he sings.
But Johnson, a notoriously prickly figure, doesn’t care if you don’t see the humor. He says as much in the album’s opener “Bad Guy”: “My whole life is music/But you don’t get to choose it/It’s my song to write.”
