In Review: Turnpike Troubadours The Price of Admission, Bon Iver SABLE, faBLE, Jon Pardi Honktonk Hollywood
Plus Motor City Is Burning: A Michigan Anthology 1965-1972 and Isaac Hayes's Hot Buttered Singles, Vol. 2: 1972-1972
Turnpike Troubadours—The Price of Admission [2025]
The Price of Admission, the seventh album from the Turnpike Troubadours, arrived without warning last week. Its sudden release stands in stark contrast to the band's slow crawl to A Cat In The Rain, the 2023 album that found the group returning to action after a prolonged absence. A Cat in the Rain bore the hallmarks of a considered comeback: every move the band made seemed deliberate, their care accentuating a set of songs about doubts and new beginnings. All that now seems like a prelude to The Price of Admission, a record that captures the Turnpike Troubadours in full flight as a collective. To that end, it's a bit of a continuation of its predecessor. It's also helmed by Shooter Jennings, a producer who hones in on the band's rangy interplay, but, more importantly, it finds lead singer/songwriter Evan Felker—whose struggles with addiction derailed the band late in the 2010s—happily shifting the songwriting burden off his shoulders. Bandmates Kyle Nix and RC Edwards contribute original material, while Felker collaborates with several noteworthy peers: Old Crow Medicine Show's Ketch Secor, John Fullbright, and Dave Simonett of Trampled By Turtles. There is a subtle difference between the collaborations and the contributions of his bandmates: the outside writers add nuance to Felker's melancholy while the insiders play to the band's barroom strengths. The Price of Admission benefits from these shifting perspectives, letting the band deliver the ballads with tenderness and pour on the gas when the tempo finally quickens. It does take a bit of time for The Price of Admission to work up a head of steam. It starts slowly with "On the Red River," the Secor co-write that lends the album its title: "We learned pain was the price of admission/And you're never done paying it down." As an isolated phrase, it sounds mournful and while it's unmistakably sorrowful, it's the centerpiece of a song that finds its narrator coming to terms with loss, recognizing that "death doesn't leave with the best part of you." Fittingly, "On the Red River" finds its counterpart in "Nothing You Can Do," a rousing closer that finds comfort, maybe even joy, in accepting the things that can not change. Here, as on the rest of The Price of Admission, Felker sings with a knowing weariness that telegraphs the emotional journey he's traveled: he's always sung as if he's been nursing a wound but now it seems as if the injury is finally starting to heal.
Bon Iver—SABLE, fABLE [2025]
SABLE, the stark EP Bon Iver released toward the end of 2024, lasted little longer than 12 minutes but it felt like a complete work: an extended exhale where Justin Vernon learned to let go of sadness. Vernon didn't abandon those qualities when expended the EP into the full-length SABLE, fABLE. Rather, he added another act,