If the afterlife had a saloon, Charley Crockett’s songs would be a perfect soundtrack to never-ending, neon-drenched drinking at the bar. Soon enough, he may have enough music to accompany eternity. Age of the Ram, Crockett’s third album in a year, stars Billy McLane, a cattle rustler-turned-outlaw on the run after crossing a powerful crime syndicate. Though conceptually grand, the record plays it safe musically, but that might not matter if you’ve come to love Crockett’s first-class honky-tonk earworms. Alongside fast-moving dance floor standouts “Fastest Gun Alive” and “Low Down Freedom,” Age of the Ram leans into lonesome-hearted ballads (“Rancho Deluxe [Main Theme]”) and intimate acoustic tracks (“Diamond Belle [Country Boy]”). If you forgot where Crockett calls home, he covers Waylon’s Eddy Raven-penned “Sweet Mother Texas” and does his best “Bloody Mary Morning” on “Me & Shooter,” where he declares that “Austin’s still the Live Music Capital of the World.” While the story can become difficult to follow, it’s still worth the price of admission to hear the self-proclaimed “Muhammad Ali of Country Music” drawl his way through a Western epic you could easily imagine him inhabiting. It’s not hard to draw parallels between McLane and Crockett’s own life story of lawlessness, romance, and rebellion. As he admits in the sugar-coated closer, “Cover My Trail Tonight”: “I’m trying to paint you a picture but there’s been quite a mixture/ Of honesty and fiction to tell it straight.”
This article appears in April 17 • 2026.