Review: Charley Crockett, an acute gambler with new album, ‘Welcome to the Hard Times’

You can feel the pain of the whole world when Charley Crockett sings. He pours every bit of his own suffering ⏤ from unlawful convictions and jail time to major heart surgery ⏤ into the songwriting. His soul-baring and impressive yarn-spinning sure beats anything you’ll likely hear on the radio. Welcome to the Hard Times, his eighth studio set, marks an important personal, if not culturally monumental, moment for him. Produced with The Black Keys’ Mark Neil, it’s a sobering, 13-song affair that perfectly captures the devastation, brutality, and sting of life. Wounds pulsing raw and red, he scraps his heart across guitar strings, allowing authentic emotion to be his guiding hand, and when facing down his demons, he never wavers.

“I wonder if you’ll notice / Would you even care / If I told you my life just isn’t fair,” he conjectures with the opener and title cut, pounding roofing nails right into the heart. His words confront and provoke, and he doesn’t beat around the bush. Courtesy of a musically inquisitive mind, and preternaturally steely demeanor, he reclaims his narrative: “My entering country music has been controversial, to say the least,” he regards in press materials. In promoting his 2015 debut album, A Stolen Jewel, he expressed to Dallas Observer that he often felt “too white to be black, too black to be white.” His hurt was a dominating force on that record and continues to be the backbone here; the songcraft arises with clearer definition, echoing roots of the past with a tortured recollection. It’s well-known country music is largely a white-washed genre, and Crockett slyly and purposefully re-centers themes of heartache and pain through his unique lens.

There’s a coolness to his presence, too. Perhaps it stems from his Wolff-Parkinson-White Syndrome diagnosis and immediate heart surgery he underwent last year. Or he’s picking apart a lifetime of hurt, not only for himself but for the entire Black community. When he slips into a spellbinding version of Willie Nelson’s “Blackjack County Chain,” it’s eerily and tragically timely ⏤ “I was sittin’ beside the road in Blackjack County / Not knowing that the sheriff paid a bounty / For men like me who didn’t have a penny to their names / So he locked my leg to thirty-five pounds of Blackjack County chain.” His performance is downright spooky and punctuates a year in which George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Amery, and countless other Black people have been murdered for simply breathing.

Crockett pummels the senses with the thorny, “The Poplar Tree,” pinned with a deceptively glistening undercurrent. In dissecting race, he regales a moral tale of a shootout that leads to not only a trail of bodies but his own lynching. “This ole boy started showing out / He killed the clerk and a young girl, who was only standing there,” he describes. Later, once he (as the narrator) has repaid the price in flesh, the dead man’s “posse caught up to me / I was holding my head up / When they hung me from a poplar tree.”

Charley Crockett’s Welcome to the Hard Times rattles right down to the soul. Whether’s he’s lamenting the hand he’s been dealt (“Heads You Win”) or revisiting his own busking days (“The Man That Time Forgot”), he stages his intensely personal stories with a universal grandeur and appeal. The record, featuring contributions from Dallas Burrow, Dan Auerbach, Colin Colby, and others, is moving, precise, and a true centerpiece of what country music should always do and be.

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