Twangville

A music blog featuring Alt-Country, Americana, Indie, Rock, Folk & Blues. Est. 2005.

Now & Then: Charley Crockett’s Age of the Ram and the reach of Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs

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Charley Crockett’s Age of the Ram arrives as the third and final entry in his Sagebrush Trilogy, a 20-song, 45-minute set built around the outlaw figure Billy McLane and cut again with Shooter Jennings in Los Angeles. The obvious move would be to compare it to some other modern revivalist country record, but Crockett is aiming farther back than that. This album is trying to turn country songs into a movie, or maybe into the memory of one, and that points straight to Marty Robbins’ Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs, the 1959 western cornerstone that helped teach later songwriters how to make myth feel personal.

Now & Then: Drayton Farley’s A Heavy Duty Heart and the reach of Trace

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Drayton Farley’s A Heavy Duty Heart arrives like the sound of a songwriter stepping out of the dim room and into the bandstand without giving up the bruises that got him there. Released March 27, 2026, the record was cut live to tape in Nashville with his touring band and produced again by Sadler Vaden, which matters because these songs are still built on Farley’s plainspoken honesty, but they now hit with more lift, more room, and more faith in momentum. For the “Then,” Son Volt’s Trace from 1995 makes the most sense. Not because Farley sounds like Jay Farrar in some copycat way, but because Trace helped define how alt-country could carry working-class weariness, road-dusted poetics, and rock-band force in the same frame. 

Now & Then: Hurray For The Riff Raff’s Live Forever and the reach of Car Wheels on a Gravel Road

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Live Forever is a live album, but it also feels like a check-in from the road, a way of hearing Hurray For The Riff Raff’s songs in a shared space. Alynda Segarra has long written with one foot in folk tradition and the other in a tougher, more restless world, where memory, loss, survival, and movement blur together. That makes Car Wheels on a Gravel Road a useful earlier marker, not because the records sound alike in every respect, but because Lucinda Williams showed how roots music could carry intimate detail, regional texture, and emotional wear without losing its bite.

Now & Then: The Steel Wheels’ The Steel Wheels and the reach of Tomorrow the Green Grass

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Some self-titled albums feel like a debut all over again. Others feel like a band planting a flag after years on the road. The Steel Wheels’ The Steel Wheels lands somewhere in between, sounding like a group confident enough to reintroduce itself without pretending it has become something entirely new. That makes The Jayhawks’ 1995 Tomorrow the Green Grass a useful “Then” match: another record by a roots-minded band that widened its reach without losing its center.

Now & Then: Reese McHenry’s Forever and the reach of Furnace Room Lullaby

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Some records show up as a comeback, some as a coronation. Released posthumously, Forever arrives with a sadder kind of gravity, but it does not feel hushed or fragile from the outside. Even the title has a little swagger. So do the songs gathered under it. McHenry’s work always carried that useful contradiction, where the voice could sound world-weary and ready to laugh at the same time, and where a tune could feel lived-in without ever slumping into the sounds of a polite singer-songwriter.