Age of the Ram, the third album Charley Crockett has released in just over a year, comes into focus with the sound of a film projector whirring to life, its soft hum accompanying the Texan troubadour as he croons about the life and times of the outlaw Billy McLane. It’s a double framing device, establishing that Crockett will spend the album following the character, while also placing the music firmly within the tradition of the tall tales of the American West, stories that are handed down through song, dime store novels, and B-movies.
Age of the Ram is the concluding chapter in Crockett’s “Sagebrush Trilogy,” and its inspiration is a bit more highfalutin than pulp. The singer-songwriter claims the idea came from somebody at Island Records, his current major-label home after a first act filled with indies. Why not make a series of records, this person suggested, modeled after Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy, the beloved writer’s set of novels about young cowboys in the American Southwest? The idea came to Crockett after he already made Lonesome Drifter, his first collaboration with producer Shooter Jennings, so he constructed its companions around two distinct archetypes: Dollar A Day is about a rustler and hustler, while Age of the Ram concerns itself with a loner who lives just outside the law.
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Crockett takes no pains to disguise that this is a recognizable trope, singing a ballad about shooting Jesse James and boasting about being the “Fastest Gun Alive.” He also laces the album with repetitions of his “Life & Times of Billy McLane” theme, evoking the way “Time of the Preacher” circles through Willie Nelson’s 1975 outlaw country landmark Red Headed Stranger. Crockett is too gregarious to replicate Willie’s austere desert balladry, though. He’ll warble an acoustic interlude on occasion, letting these quiet moments punctuate the rangy ramble of his roadhouse band.
In emphasizing feel and groove over story, though, Crockett inadvertently reveals his cards. He’s too restless to concentrate on an extended narrative, preferring to create a collage where the familiar gets enlivened by his idiosyncrasies. Take the other recurring motif that runs throughout Age of the Ram: Jimmy Buffett’s theme song to Rancho Deluxe, a country comedy from 1975 starring Jeff Bridges and Sam Waterston that isn’t particularly well-known outside of Parrotheads. Here, its sunburnt charms feel as natural as the country-funk of “Kentucky Too Long,” the revved-up saloon song “My Last Drink of Wine,” the hardcore honky tonk of “Fastest Gun Alive,” or the laid-back travelogue of “Lonesome Dove.”
“Lonesome Dove” nods to Larry McMurtry’s epic Western novel of the same name, immortalized in a mini-series starring Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones. But the more telling tip of the hat is a couple of covers of songs associated with Waylon Jennings, the father of the album’s producer. Crockett digs up Eddy Raven’s “Sweet Mother Texas” from one of Waylon’s forgotten ’80s records, then revives “Low Down Freedom,” a Billy Joe Shaver song Jennings put on Honky Tonk Heroes, another definitive outlaw country text. By summoning both Willie and Waylon on Age of the Ram, Crockett casually infers that he’s their heir, tipping his hat to tradition instead of grabbing the outlaw crown.
