At its core, country music pillars on a bedrock of relatability, tapping into those time-tested human emotions of yearning and regret, love and desperation, and the crux between quiet moments of humility and the loud restlessness of ambition. So much depends upon a red Solo cup.
How, then, might country music confront the raw, unfamiliar realities in our current barrage of “unprecedented times”? Jason Boland’s 10th studio LP, The Light Saw Me, delivers one unexpected response: a sci-fi honky-tonk concept album that stands as one of the year’s more ambitious, bizarre, and brazen efforts.
The narrative, winding through 11 tracks, remains loose and not immediately obvious. Ostensibly, the story follows a 19th century Texas cowboy abducted by aliens and transported to the late 20th century, a conceit that’s never quite explained.
Yet the tale is told in the revealing moments of dread and uncertainty, an existential crisis where the institutions of religion, reason, and government completely fail to make sense of the event, or even actively undermine an attempt to understand it. “Having visions of things that bear explaining/ No answers in religion or the law,” the confounded narrator confesses on “A Tornado & the Fool.”
Boland has always worked as somewhat of an anomaly within the popular Red Dirt scene. The Okie-turned-Austinite’s rich baritone drawl and hard-driving melodies folded 1999 debut Pearl Snaps easily into Texas country radio, setting up alongside the new breed of young kickers like Kevin Fowler and Pat Green.
Maturity and sobriety brought deeper resonance and perspective to 2006’s The Bourbon Legend and 2008’s Comal County Blue (see “Beyond the Bourbon Legend,” Music, April 10, 2009). Boland’s writing unraveled hard emotions and complex narratives with a suavity that could still pull the KVET crowd and pack a dance hall. Rancho Alto (2011) swayed in traditional steel with Lloyd Maines’ production, and Dark & Dirty Mile (2013) fiddled a poignant heartbreak.
Boland’s quintet, the Stragglers, still flashed more adventurous edges within his honky-tonk sound, though. 2015’s Squelch ripped a wry, fame-bashing, punk turn with “I Guess It’s Alright to Be an Asshole” and the twisted closing political screed of “Fuck, Fight, and Rodeo.” 2018’s Hard Times Are Relative likewise managed to sneak in a tight, Ramones-inspired rocker with “Dee Dee OD’d.” Boland could still jerk a tear with the best, but he was shedding preconceptions, clearly having a blast, and asking bigger questions than country music typically takes on.
So while The Light Saw Me seems on the surface an outrageous project for the Texas troubadour, Boland’s actually just discarded any previous pretenses and leaned all-in on the cosmic questioning he’s been building toward. The obvious comparison runs to Sturgill Simpson’s metaphysical, genre-tripping turns, but Boland’s working a different, more grounded angle.
Recorded in early 2021 with the equally maverick Shooter Jennings producing, the songs grapple with a search for meaning, inverting Hank Williams’ famous salvation anthem. Throughout, Boland raises questions about the purpose we’re called into, how we confront and cope with the unimaginable, and the choices and consequences we live with.
The album’s metaphors flicker with a dual reality. The arrival of “A Tornado & the Fool” parallels alien encounter with natural disaster, and the sweet waltzing “Here for You” echoes as both an extraterrestrial abduction and deployment to war. Yet the thread that sews these hallucinogenic veils together is the question asked at the outset: “Is love imagination rendered inside the mind?/ Or consciousness projected from another place in time?” ponders opener “Terrifying Nature,” ultimately reckoning “So take away the lesson, love loved ones now and here/ Knowing not the season they all could disappear.“
Centerpiece tracks “Transmission In” and “Transmission Out” spin into another sonic plane with the warping breakdown and Southern boogie grooving behind the crackpot prophetic poetry spoken like a rogue late-night AM band. Even more surprising is the jazzy funk whip of “Future” bleeding into the bluesy wail of “Straight Home.”
By the time the band swoons into a cover of Bob Childers’ “Restless Spirits,” it transports the song into an existential redemption, a tether back into reality through the eavesdropped melody. What’s left is the closing realization of “A Place to Stay,” recognizing that we’re all lost in the struggle of this strange life together, and only in extending empathy and understanding might we find that greater connection and purpose.
Boland’s great concept album endeavor may strike as too convoluted to top his catalog, but it also sets the songwriter free to launch into new creative paths and continue expanding what country music can be.
This article appears in December 31 • 2021.
