Over the past 10 years, Charley Crockett has released 15 albums, some just months apart. His latest, Dollar a Day, arrives only five months since March’s Lonesome Drifter. But this cycle, at least, doesn’t feel the least bit rushed or half-baked. Rather, the Texas country singer has found his groove. And, boy, is it funky.
Credit that partly to Shooter Jennings, who produced Lonesome Drifter and reteamed with Crockett for Dollar a Day. Jennings has always been enamored of slinky, greasy country sounds — listen to his 2018 Shooter album — and he sprinkles those accents across most of the LP’s 15 songs. The result plays like a mashup between a soundtrack to a spaghetti western and one for a 1970s crime film. And when you remember that Crockett teased Lonesome Drifter as the first part of what he calls the Sagebrush Trilogy, Dollar a Day’s cinematic scope makes perfect sense.
If there’s an overarching theme to the album, it’s one of being bought and sold. In the title track that opens the LP, Crockett laments that “cowboys and money…meet only briefly, and part company.” In the plucky “Crucified Son,” he returns to his oft-repeated, lean-times origin story of busking and hoboing, recounting how, in Nashville, he slept behind a honky-tonk on the outskirts of town. Still, Crockett declares, “I was born the lucky one.”
Those songs, along with the sparse “Woman in a Bar” and the sad ballad “I’m Gonna Die With My Dreams On,” are the most traditional country of the batch, and they’re quite good. But the real heat of Dollar a Day comes when Crockett leans into the weird. “Lonestar” is a swaggering, ominous vignette in which he boasts about sporting “13 diamonds around my neck.” “Santa Fe Ring” is a tale of betrayal that gallops like “Ghost Riders in the Sky.” And “Tennessee Quick Cash” is a slice of swamp-country in line with Tony Joe White’s “Polk Salad Annie” — Crockett even does some Tony Joe-like sing-speaking. “Here’s what I do when I walk in there,” he ad libs before a guitar solo, and later shouts out Jennings as the producer plays barroom piano right into a fade-out. (In a classic Jennings studio move, the song also fades in.)
The not-to-be-missed track, however, is “Destroyed,” which leaves you every bit as wrecked as its title. Bursting out of the gate with rollicking drums, it’s got all the oomph and soul of Ike & Tina’s “Nutbush City Limits,” as Crockett declares, “I’m weak as a lamb and my head is spinning like a top.” (It also, intentionally or not, makes the case that if “Destroyed” is country music, then so is Beyoncé’s similarly vibed “Ya Ya.” Listen to them back to back.)
At the song’s midpoint, a chorus of background singers repeats “Got me destroyed” with a ramshackle charm that brings to mind the Swingin’ Medallions’ 1966 oldie “Double Shot (Of My Baby’s Love).” It’s loud, boisterous, and unchecked — the sound of Crockett and Jennings striking solid country-funk gold.
