“If I had an idea that gave me a feeling, I would pursue it,” Turnpike Troubadours frontman Evan Felker tells Rolling Stone. “On this record, it was all about trying to find songs in a very different manner than overthinking things, or trying to let people know that I could write some cool lines or that I know a big word. Not trying to impress anyone, just trying to feel something.”
Felker is referencing The Price of Admission, an 11-track record that Turnpike dropped on Friday after a week of hints and Easter eggs ahead of this weekend’s “The Boys From Oklahoma” concerts with Cross Canadian Ragweed at Boone Pickens Stadium in Stillwater, Oklahoma.
The first clue that something was afoot came last weekend, when the band released the song “Be Here” exclusively to TouchTunes jukeboxes — a callback to Turnpike’s 2023 album A Cat in the Rain, which was accidentally revealed early via a “leak” to TouchTunes. Then, on Monday, a series of billboards advertising the album peppered the main roads into Stillwater, where Turnpike co-headlines this weekend with Ragweed for more than 180,000 ticketholders. Thursday night marked the first of four consecutive shows, and Turnpike confirmed The Price of Admission’s release on stage.
It also marks the sixth studio album for the Oklahoma six-piece and the second in a row produced by Shooter Jennings. With Red Dirt as a genre enjoying its greatest popularity — between Ragweed’s reunion and a series of rising stars like Wyatt Flores, Kaitlin Butts, and Josh Meloy drawing eye-popping crowds and streaming numbers — The Price of Admission serves as a reminder that Turnpike is still the genre’s torchbearer and they will brook no passing on the left or the right. The band is at its lyrical and musical peak across the board, and The Price of Admission stands to rival their 2020 debut Diamonds and Gasoline as the best of their projects.
Unlike A Cat in the Rain, which was painstakingly crafted in the wake of Turnpike’s self-imposed break from 2019 to 2022, The Price of Admission came together in a matter of weeks.
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“I sat down for 30 days and wrote,” Felker says. “I got everything ready for the record and then finished them in the studio at the end of that 30 days.”
The two songs that came from someone other than Felker are “Ruby Ann,” written by Lance Roark and Turnpike’s bass player RC Edwards, and “Nothing You Can Do, written by Kyle Nix, who plays fiddle for the Troubadours. In a significant departure from most of his songwriting catalog, however, Felker embraced the process of co-writing for this record, collaborating with Nix and John Fullbright, as well as Ketch Secor of Old Crow Medicine Show and Dave Simonett of Trampled by Turtles on four of the tunes. Fullbright’s hometown of Okemah, Oklahoma, is Felker’s adopted home. Secor and Simonett have both featured on bills opening for Turnpike in the past two years — and Old Crow Medicine Show has another on the schedule in July at the Ledge Amphitheater in Waite Park, Minnesota.
“Old Crow Medicine Show has been my favorite band — or one of my two favorite bands — for a long time,” Felker says. “The way those guys write and the way that they play had a huge impact on my songwriting and sort of became the framework of the way I look at how a song comes together.”
The Secor co-write is the opening track, “On the Red River,” an emotional tribute to a lost parent that sets the tone for the depth in writing and lyrics across the record. Fullbright contributed to “Searching for a Light” and Simonett and Felker wrote “Leaving Town” together.
Still, the standout songs are a pair that Felker wrote himself, largely on his ranch outside of Okemah where he lives with his wife, Staci, and their two children. Both “Be Here” and “What Was Advertised” are two of the most personal songs Felker has ever written. “Be Here” is drawn from Felker’s experience finding sobriety in 2020. “There’s never been a better song about rehab,” Jennings says of the song — which also features the band chanting the choruses of “I really don’t need to be here” and “Oh, Lord, the road I’m on.”
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“I was thinking about being in rehab,” Felker says. “It’s written from my perspective, and as far as my songs go, it’s maybe the most autobiographical thing I’ve written. But I always wanted to write a sea shanty, too. I was thinking about that chant being sort of the voice in your head.”
Meanwhile, on “What Was Advertised,” Felker laments the boozing, partying days that led to Turnpike’s hiatus and his journey to sobriety in the first place. He stops short of disowning the lifestyle, but he certainly takes some self-deprecating shots at it when he sings, “Did you dig yourself a hole with your lack of self control? Well if that ain’t rock and roll, I’ve never seen it.”
The lyrics are only half of what makes Turnpike, well, Turnpike. Felker, Nix, and Edwards are joined in the band by Hank Early on steel guitar and accordion, Ryan Engleman on lead guitar, and Gabe Pearson on drums. The process of recording A Cat in the Rain endeared both band and producer to one another, and Jennings — who enjoys relying on instinct and eschewing pre-production or anything conducive to overthinking — needed little convincing to make this a quick project.
“We turned around this record in one month,” he says. “It’s because Evan was very happy during the whole thing. It was an awesome process.”
In summer 2024, Turnpike played a series of stadium shows opening for Zach Bryan — a feat the band will repeat in July over two nights at Hyde Park in London — and Felker invited Jennings to sit in on keys. The experience was informative for Jennings, who saw up-close how Turnpike’s members feed off one another during a live show. He harnessed the energy in recording The Price of Admission when they gathered at Sunset Sound Studio 3 in Los Angeles.
“Evan wrote some of the best songs he’s ever written, hands down,” Jennings says. “He was so focused and had them crafted around his vision for them. And we ended up making their most country record yet, I feel…. It was like seeing one of the greatest American rock and country bands, like, in their top form, operating at their best efficiency. We had such a good time, and it was really special.”
The result is a record that leans into all of Turnpike’s strengths. There are stomping country jams that crowds can sing along to, but also waltzes and ballads. Meanwhile, Felker pushed his voice further than he ever has on a Turnpike record.
He also cited industry changes in the past half-decade as fans have gravitated to artists who write and release music quickly, even if they may not be polished or heavily produced. Felker found such an approach liberating as an artist and says he plans to lean into it going forward.
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“What’s so fucking cool about this is that we just decided to say hell with it and not try to sell this record,” Felker says. “We’re just gonna put a record out, and then I’m gonna write more songs. I just really want to make things and then put them out for everybody with no lag and no bullshit in between.”
Josh Crutchmer is a journalist and author whose fourth book, Never Say Never: Cross Canadian Ragweed, Boys From Oklahoma, and a Red Dirt Comeback Story for the Ages, is set for release on April 21.
