Ask a dozen artists why they decided to release a live album, and you’re likely to get a dozen different reasons. For Tylor Ketchum, founder and frontman of Tylor & the Train Robbers, it was all about capturing the musicianship of an evolving band.
“I wanted to get a snapshot of this set that we are doing,” Ketchum tells Rolling Stone. He’s talking about Tylor & the Train Robbers Live, the fifth album and first live LP for the Boise, Idaho, folk-rock outfit. The 23-song record draws from a decade of Train Robbers songs, with four covers thrown in for good measure.
“We’ve all progressed as musicians,” Ketchum says. “I sing the songs differently. There’s different arrangements, more confidence — and living with these songs for so many years, you kind of find new life to them. I just wanted to get a good take on what they are currently, and maybe get people to go back and look at our early stuff, too.”
Ketchum and his band recorded the album over two nights in November 2024 at Treefort Music Hall, a 1,000-capacity rock room that opened a year earlier in downtown Boise. Ketchum, a native of Oregon who now lives in the Idaho capital, fronts the Train Robbers and plays rhythm guitar. He’s joined by brothers Jason and Tommy Bushman on bass and drums, Antonio Vazquez on lead guitar, and Rider Soran on pedal steel, lap steel, and electric guitar.
After spending most of 2024 touring off their Hum of the Road record, the group brought in Texas producer Adam Odor to oversee the live project.
“He had done some Live at Billy Bob’s records,” Ketchum says, “like Micky and the Motorcars — which is one of the better-sounding live records that I’ve heard out of there. The audio was great, and I wanted to do a similar package to that. Yes, a Billy Bob’s thing was a dream of mine, but I decided I wanted to do it in Idaho.”
The record is heavy on Ketchum’s baritone vocals and electric honky-tonk sound that helped the Train Robbers gain a fanbase in the Pacific Northwest since their 2017 debut, Gravel. Ketchum sings about getting busted for possession in the town of Challis on “Custer County” and about winning the lottery on “Good at Bad News,” both of which are staples of Train Robbers’ live shows. But there were plenty of moments — like the album’s re-imagining of “Place Like This” from an acoustic lament to a full-band two-step — where the band dismantled and rebuilt a song.
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“I recorded that solo, with a couple of cellos, and it was pretty minimal on the production,” Ketchum says of the song. “When we played it live, we did it with the full band. I really liked that version. It was really country. The harmonies brought a lot of that out, too.”
The band augmented its catalog with covers of the Byrds (“Feel Like a Whole Lot Better”), the Doobie Brothers (“Listen to the Music”), and Waylon Jennings (“Lonesome, On’ry and Mean”), all live-show favorites. The fourth cover, however, belonged to Pinto Bennett, the late singer-songwriter who made an outsized impact on country music in the Pacific Northwest for nearly half a century until his death in 2021. Bennett was wildly influential to the careers of Reckless Kelly and Micky and the Motorcars, a pair of native Idaho bands that helped expose Tylor & the Train Robbers to a coast-to-coast fan base over the past decade. When Ketchum decided to include a Bennett song on the live album, he sought one that neither Reckless nor the Motorcars had covered first — “No Sweat,” co-written by Bennett, Chris Wall, and Mark Webb.
“The Brauns have recorded a bunch of Pinto’s music,” Ketchum says, referencing the musical Braun brothers who founded both Reckless and the Motorcars. “That was one that wasn’t on one of their records, and one that I always felt would be really fun to do live. Plus, you have to be a tight band to pull that off. There’s a lot of stops, and everybody’s really gotta be on the same page.”
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Tylor & the Train Robbers kick off an extensive tour in early March that will last through May and stretch from Oregon to Texas, including stops at historic venues like the Hotel Turkey in Turkey, Texas, and the Silver Dollar Bar & Grill in Jackson, Wyoming. Ketchum also says a reunion with Odor is in the works, this time for a studio project: “We’ve got a batch of new originals ready.”
Josh Crutchmer is a journalist and author whose book (Almost) Almost Famous will be released April 1 via Back Lounge Publishing.