Over the past two years, as country music’s pivot toward traditional sounds has taken root, Lance Roark has often had the best seat in the house. When Wyatt Flores made his headlining debut at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium in late 2024, Roark opened the show. He has written songs that were featured on each of the last two Turnpike Troubadours records and the most recent Muscadine Bloodline album. This fall, he landed prime opening slots for both Noeline Hofmann and the Castellows. Now, he’s taking his turn in the spotlight.
“I’m ready to expand this thing to a nationwide audience,” Roark says of his full-length debut, Bad Reputation, which dropped on Friday. The 11-track record, a blend of Oklahoma Red Dirt and Southern rock, is heavy on characters and landscapes shaped by Roark’s own musical journey.
“In Bad Reputation, I go through the evolution of a guy dealing with life’s ups and downs, and dealing with situations where you’re always going to be the bad person in someone’s eyes,” Roark tells Rolling Stone. “That’s where I’m at currently in my writing. Bad Reputation is a collection of songs that I want to tell that story with.”
Roark is from the same Oklahoma town — Tahlequah — that gave rise to Turnpike, and has spent the last half-decade playing with, writing with, and being mentored by Turnpike bassist RC Edwards. They co-wrote a pair of Turnpike Troubadours songs, “Chipping Mill” off the band’s 2024 record A Cat in the Rain, and “Ruby Ann” from the Red Dirt torchbearers’ 2025 album, The Price of Admission. Roark threw Turnpike fans a bone with the latter, as the character Ruby Ann reappears in “Colorado High” on Bad Reputation.
Certainly, the Red Dirt stalwarts are an influence on Roark, but his sound features more electric guitars and a rhythm closer to bluegrass than the swampy country approach of Turnpike. Produced by Andrew Bair (who has played keys for Paul Cauthen and Jason Boland and the Stragglers) and largely recorded at the Closet Studio in Tulsa, Bad Reputation emphasizes Roark’s gravelly vocals and storytelling lyrics. The self-aware title track features Roark lamenting “trouble’s all I’ve known.” Meanwhile, “Rose Quartz Perfume” is laced with optimism, despite being inspired by an unsuccessful quest by Roark and his wife, Hannah, to have a child.
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“I had read about the effects of rose quartz, the stone,” Roark recalls. “So, I bought her a whole bunch of those. I wanted to help out. Well, life has its certain ways, and it didn’t work out. I wrote the majority of that song and got the chorus where I wanted it, and I took it to RC, and he helped me finish it. I wanted to put to words the feeling of Hannah and I trying for another child and it not coming to fruition right now, but maybe in another time it will.”
Roark’s friendship with Edwards dates back to the pandemic. Roark and his wife had moved to Tahlequah from nearby Gore, and Roark found occasional work playing at a bar in Tahlequah that happened to be one of Edwards’ favorite hangouts. Sure enough, Edwards showed up one night and took notice. He and Roark became fast friends, brief bandmates in Edwards’ band, and co-writers.
“I was trying a song out for the very first time, and he heard it,” Roark says of Edwards. “After I got offstage, he said, ‘Man, you sounded really good. Would you want to play electric guitar for me in my band?’ And I said, ‘Absolutely.’ We did that for a little while, and we started writing together. He took me under his wing and showed me everything he knew about the business, media and songwriting. He brought me around the Turnpike guys, and they’ve also taken me under their wing. They’ve helped me hone my craft as a professional. Turnpike is very efficient. They go out there, they mind their P’s and Q’s, they kill their set, and then they go do it again the next night. I’m glad I got those lessons.”
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Roark fell into Turnpike’s circles, ultimately signing with Turnpike’s agent, Jon Folk, who also books Muscadine Bloodline. Those connections led to a series of writing sessions in Nashville in late 2024. Roark joined Charlie Stanton and Gary Muncaster of Muscadine for one of those. The result was “Grace,” which made it onto Muscadine’s Longleaf Lo-Fi record that the Alabama outfit released in mid-November.
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“In the course of the two days that I sat there and wrote with Gary and Charlie, we pumped out like seven or eight songs,” Roark says. “They’ve got ‘Grace’ and I might have one that I may put out in another project. It sounds like a Muscadine song to me, but it’s about Tahlequah. I hope that we have, like, three of these that are gonna come out eventually.”
Josh Crutchmer is a journalist and author whose book (Almost) Almost Famous will be released April 1 via Back Lounge Publishing.
