In 2019, Oklahoma country band Turnpike Troubadours earned more critical and commercial success than ever before. As their career rapidly climbed upwards, frontman Evan Felker hit rock bottom.
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He chose to walk away from the band, following a string of canceled tour dates and a flurry of rumors about Felker’s personal struggles. Through a post on their social media pages, Turnpike Troubadours announced they were going on a hiatus that could only end at “a time we feel that everyone is of strong mind, body and spirit.”
Felker returned to Oklahoma and shifted his priorities, putting everything to do with music on the back burner.
“I took a clean break,” he tells American Songwriter. “The only thing I was ever interested in was songwriting and being a songwriter. Even if I was misguided, that’s the only thing I cared anything about from the time I was about 21 or 22 until we hung it up for a while. I had missed out on many facets of life that were just as important, if not far more important, than creating anything.
“So I focused on those… and I built a lot of fences. And not figuratively,” he adds with a laugh. “I built some really long stretches of barbed wire fence in Texas in the middle of August.”
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Those long summer days of manual labor left plenty of time for Felker to reflect on who he was and how he got there.
“I learned a lot about being a good guy and how there are a lot of harder ways to make a living,” he says. “Honestly, just knowing that I can do things and having a fairly honest appraisal of my worth as something other than a songwriter helps me in every other facet of life.”
During that time, Felker found sobriety, remarried his ex-wife, and embraced life outside his music career. Eventually, he came back together with his bandmates, including founding member R.C. Edwards, to try their hand at creating a new album.
In the past, Felker drew from a deep well of gathered concepts for the songs that made records like Diamonds & Gasoline and A Long Way from Your Heart so well-received.
“I rarely ever am struck by lightning—as far as inspiration goes—and just sit down and finish something,” he notes of his creative process. “I’m always compiling things and looking for a novel idea or observation within the realm of day-to-day life. I’m just trying to make the next thing I like or am proud of or feel like I’ve solved another of life’s puzzles or riddles.”
This time, Felker entered the process with a blank slate.
“[I had] almost nothing. It was very, very, very scary,” he explains with a nervous laugh. “I know this sounds like an excuse for somebody underprepared, but it was now or never. I thought, ‘I have to do something to jar myself into this or out of the situation that I’m in, or else I’ll be in that sort of procrastination loop or a writer’s block, maybe for the rest of my life.”
As worries and self-doubt hovered over him, Felker pushed through, siphoning the encouragement of his bandmates.
“We just took the plunge, set some deadlines, and that was enough to get going. And it wasn’t like I wasn’t trying to write. I was just scared,” he admits. “You get things built up in your head, and with us coming back, there’s this sort of felt expectation. Knowing that I had to finish something and that I would be putting my name on something or wasting everybody’s time got me through it.”
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The process of creating the ten tracks on A Cat in the Rain, Turnpike Troubadours’ long-awaited sixth studio album, forced Felker to face a brand new set of challenges. His separation from songwriting had built a creative divide that seemed almost impossible to cross.
“It was nerve-wracking because I built it up in my mind and didn’t have much material. It was hard. It was really scary until I sat down and wrote “Lucille” almost in one sitting.” That small win was a needed creative breakthrough for Felker. “I thought, ‘I can probably do this. This is something I’m capable of still.'”
The band recruited Shooter Jennings to help guide their return to the studio. The seasoned musician, songwriter, and son of outlaw country power couple Waylon Jennings and Jessi Colter took on the role of producer.
“He is one of the most disarming, comforting, good people that I’ve ever met, aside from knowing everything about every song and record that’s ever been written, who was on it, how they played it, what they used to record it, the microphones, and just everything,” Felker says of Jennings.
“He loves it. He might love it more than he loves playing music, I don’t know,” he says with a chuckle. “I don’t know how you can be that good and excited about anything. I admire him for even having that level of passion. It’s inspiring.”
The creative vision Jennings’ used on hit records for Brandi Carlile and Tanya Tucker was put to good use on A Cat In the Rain. It’s a bolder but more polished version of the gritty, Red Dirt country sound that made Turnpike Troubadours one of the genre’s most celebrated independent acts.
“He has a lot more ideas than anybody I’ve met and is willing to try every one of ’em,” Felker adds. “He has this supernatural ability to keep the ball rolling and things fun. He doesn’t turn it into a grind where you beat the life out of it. It keeps that very live feel and keeps you in it instead of turning into this chore of trying to attain perfection.”
The process of writing and immediately recording songs back to back was a whirlwind that Felker knew wasn’t sustainable.
“We recorded every day in Muscle Shoals for about two and a half weeks,” he says. “We’d set aside maybe a month, but after we got nearly half the record done, I knew I wouldn’t be able to keep writing and recording those songs all day, every day.
“I knew it when I hit the point of diminishing returns, and I was so proud of the work that we’ve done so far that I wasn’t just going to just pass anything through. So we packed up and rescheduled.”
That two-month pause allowed Felker to avoid burnout while working to regain his creative groove.
“I wanted to get enough songs together that felt somewhat cohesive and were a certain quality,” he says. “A lot of the time, I’m trying to get songs that work for us and our band and to keep them at a high enough level of lyrical storytelling to where they’re not something that’s just filling up time on the record.”
The narrative-driven quality of Felker’s lyrics that helped earn Turnpike Troubadours such a vast and diverse organic following is still at the heart of their latest project. A Cat In the Rain still centers around storytelling but collectively feels more personal than ever before.
Through tracks like the resolute “Chipping Mill,” welcoming “East Side Love Song (Bottoms Up),” and a cover of John Fullbright’s “Three More Days,” the band cultivates a collection of songs closely tied to leaving bygones behind and finding a fresh start.
The record closes with “Won’t You Give Me One More Chance,” a plea to start anew and regain a relationship that was left broken. The stirring lyricism confirmed Felker’s gifts as a songwriter haven’t lessened, even after such an extensive pause.
This period of artistic and personal evolution has led the 39-year-old frontman back to his old creative processes, albeit through a much healthier approach.
“I’m still pretty romantic about the process of writing, so I still want to go somewhere and immerse myself in it,” Felker explains.
His efforts to keep a healthy balance of life on the road and time spent with family, which includes two children under the age of two, means those moments of solitary creation are scarcer than before.
“I’m focusing on everything else just because we’ve got a couple of little kids, and it’s difficult to write,” he says. “We do have an idea or two, and I’m certainly not nearly as intimidated by it as I was last time around.”
As Turnpike Troubadours and Felker himself enter a new era, he maintains a humble demeanor about what they’ve accomplished together.
“We tried new things, and the performances on this record feel much more comfortable in their own skin than in previous times,” he says. “There’s a confidence to it, and it is a very realistic appraisal of what we can do.”
(Photo by David McClister, Courtesy of Sacks & Co.)
