In 1963, Marty Robbins released a rodeo tune called “Old Red.” The title is the name of an ornery bull that had “never been rode” until he drew Billy McLane, a brash young cowboy who had “never been thrown.” Both meet their demise at the hands of the other when Old Red flips on his back, breaking his neck and crushing McLane to death. Neither the bull nor the cowboy gave in, and they were buried together, so the song goes.
“I think that’s a good death,” Charley Crockett says. “That’s all you can do, you know? Try to be sticky.”
But Crockett’s world is art, where characters don’t have to die. The prolific Texas songwriter revived Billy McLane as the central character in Age of the Ram, his latest studio effort released on Friday via Island Records. The 20-track LP serves as equal parts music and cinema in which Crockett weaves a tale of McLane as a cattle rustler on the run from the law who — eventually — gets his redemption.
The record once again finds Crockett paired with producer Shooter Jennings at Sunset Sound Studio 3 in Los Angeles, where the two recorded Lonesome Drifter and Dollar a Day — the first two installments of Crockett’s “Sagebrush Trilogy.” Age of the Ram completes the series and gives Crockett three major albums since mid-March 2025.
Crockett may have centered the record around McLane, but he’s putting himself on full display from start to finish. McLane’s character provides endless allegory for the music industry dynamics that Crockett has eschewed over his two-decade career. His story, from New York City busker to his felony conviction for running drugs to a full-scale breakthrough over the past five years, runs parallel to that of McLane. If the cowboy in Age of the Ram were real and here today, he’d be going toe-to-toe with Gavin Adcock or praising Bad Bunny’s authenticity in a crowd of posers or getting turned away trying to enter Canada because of past transgressions.
“There were two storylines going on,” Jennings says of the prior installments in the Sagebrush Trilogy. “One of them was about Charley’s real life, intertwined in songs like ‘Easy Money.’ Then, there was this kind of fantasy story, which you hear in ‘Lone Star’ and some other songs, but they were also still telling Charley’s story — particularly the story of his career with labels and managers and things. He had this concept to reveal that character in the fantasy storyline to be Billy McLane.”
Crockett and Jennings do reveal this through a mix of songs, themes, and sounds of the Old West that stretch out over the course of the record. Crockett laments the outlaw life on “Rancho Deluxe,” embraces it on “I Shot Jesse James,” and gets the hell out of Dodge on “Kentucky Too Long.” Notorious Western duos — Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid — are central to the record’s theme. He sings of his main character’s “love, revenge, and redemption in the end” on a series of short thematic tracks dubbed “The Life & Times of Billy McLane” and ties the entire story up in a tune simply titled “Billy McLane.”
Crockett credits Jennings with drawing the music, and the concept, out of him.
“My ability to write songs and finish songs on the spot? I’m doing that at a more confident, faster clip,” Crockett says. “Before, a lot of times, I felt judged, or I felt that I was reduced to an actor on a movie set or something.
“When I talked to Shooter about going for a concept album, I was thinking of Dollar a Day as the concept, after Lonesome Drifter was done,” he continues. “It was Shooter Jennings who came in the studio one day and said, ‘Imagine that the thread was through the three records.’ The first record is calling ahead to the second and third. The second record is calling back and forward. The third record is calling back. Because he’s so into a lot of fantasy and sci-fi, I think he’s able to make concept albums, trilogies, and sagas his thing. It’s his bread and butter. He could look out there at the stars and draw the constellation.”
In the year since Lonesome Drifter, Crockett has kept moving. He dropped Dollar a Day in August, landing a Grammy nomination for Best Traditional Country Album — which Crockett publicly offered to give up to Turnpike Troubadours after The Price of Admission was snubbed by the Recording Academy. By that time, he and Jennings were already working on Age of the Ram.
Listeners are likely to hear Age of the Ram and conclude that the “Sagebrush Trilogy” was planned by Crockett and Jennings all along. In truth, they were building it in real time. Crockett says, “After we made Dollar A Day, I think we were looking around like, ‘What do we do, now that we’ve gotten out ahead of ourselves and hyped up this ‘Sagebrush Trilogy’?’”
What they had going for them were expectations. Along with Dollar a Day’s Grammy nomination, both previous installments had charted in the Billboard 200, and Crockett’s fans were bought in. All he and Jennings needed to do was deliver a finale.
The hard part was figuring out what a finale might look like.
“I couldn’t just come out and make a record that, song-by-song, I could be sure that critics and industry people and fans could say, ‘This is clearly an evolution from the first and the second one.’ I decided that the only way to complete it was to make it a concept album,” he says of Ram. “It’s really easy to sell people on the idea of a concept album and then it not come through as one. A lot of people have tried.”
At least one person, though, has pulled it off. He just happens to be the artist who wields the most influence on Crockett. For all the fusing of soul, blues, and Tejano sounds in his music, Crockett holds Wille Nelson’s craft closest to his heart. Even in a world of Nelson admirers, Crockett stands out for how thoroughly he seeks to understand his Spicewood, Texas, neighbor. He is moved by Nelson’s music and lyrics, but mostly, Nelson provides a guiding light for Crockett’s own navigation of Nashville and the larger music business. Which meant that, if he was ending the Sagebrush Trilogy with a concept record, it had to live up to Red Headed Stranger.
Nelson’s 1975 album spins a yarn about a fugitive on the run after killing his wife and her lover. Nelson being impossible to emulate and Crockett being unable to sound like anyone but himself lets Age of the Ram to live on its own, but Red Headed Stranger was the lens through which Crockett saw it taking shape. If both albums were Westers, they would air back-to-back on old-school cable television. That’s the space Crockett sought to occupy.
“I’ve had conversations with people in the press about Red Headed Stranger that, when you get to talking to them, they don’t even know why they’re proclaiming Red Headed Stranger as the best country record of all-time. They’re just hearing from everybody around them that it’s what you should do,” Crockett says. “That legend around that record makes fucking around with a concept album in country music pretty much a red herring.”
Crockett had taken a run at an album series before, not long before he came under Universal’s umbrella by signing with Island Records in early 2025. His $10 Cowboy and Visions of Dallas records the year before had been intended as complementary.
He even introduced Billy McLane in the title track of $10 Cowboy. As his profile rose after 2021’s The Man From Waco, which too was initially envisioned as a concept record, Crockett found his crowds especially engaged with his onstage banter. He would often say during shows, “Ain’t no such thing as a cowboy that couldn’t be thrown or a horse that couldn’t be rode!” Every once in a while, a fan would fire back, “You’re forgettin’ about Billy McLane!”
“It stuck, and I ended up making him into the character in ‘$10 Cowboy,’” Crockett says. “People called me a ten-dollar cowboy. I always said it’s a dime-store cowboy adjusted for inflation.”
$10 Cowboy and its successor came across as personal to Crockett’s story, but they lacked big, sweeping threads holding them together. It was the one-two of Jennings and some bravado with Island CEO Justin Eshak that led Crockett to return to his concept ideas after signing with the label.
“I told the Island gang, ‘I’m dead serious about releasing a lot of music. There’s no way around that. If we’re gonna have any issues, that’s where it’s gonna be. And Justin Eshak said, ‘Yeah. We know. We know. We know.’
“Then, he said, ‘You oughta look at this like Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy.’ That was the first thing he said and I really liked that,” Crockett continues. “I said, ‘OK. Now that you suggested a trilogy, I’m damn sure gonna hold you to it.’”
Wherever Crockett goes from here — aside from a headlining tour that stretches into the fall and includes a two-night residency at Billy Bob’s Texas and a slot at Central Park Summerstage in Manhattan — he will not be lacking fodder. Enough has happened since he finished Age of the Ram to fill another record at the rate that Crockett writes music.
The Canada stop, in particular, though, was a lot more serious than he made it out to be when he posted to social media a photo of the letter he was given after trying to cross into British Columbia from Washington for a run of shows.
“They arrested me and shit, and I hadn’t sat in a jail cell in a while,” Crockett says. “I was only there for about an hour, and they let me out pretty quick. At first, they were throwing the book at me, and then they just kicked me out of the country.
“Somebody said that I put that piece of paper up on social media for outlaw cred. That’s such bullshit. I put it up for all the people who I knew were gonna think that I was lying. They’re always gonna say, ‘Oh, he couldn’t sell tickets. Charley’s got a fuckin’ secret vice …’ Those rumors were gonna fly either way, but I knew I could quell a lot of that. I’ve got business people to think about, and they deserve a very clear answer as well. I thought that was clear.”
It was Crockett’s past catching up with him that spurred it. His 2016 felony conviction after being stopped in Virginia on Interstate 81 with six pounds of marijuana kept him out of Canada. He got 10 years probation. He also got his music career on track. At the time of his stop, marijuana legalization was booming in the United States, and Crockett figured he had a better chance at a sustainable future if he got his foot in the door rather than sticking with music.
When I talked to Crockett, he was sitting in a green room at the Wind Creek Events Center in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in early March. It was the first show he played since being denied entry into Canada. His trip to Bethlehem reminded him where everything turned in his life.
“I want you to know something,” Crockett says. “I was riding up 81 all morning today. I rode right past the spot that I got caught. I am lucky that I only had six pounds and six ounces on me. If he’d have pulled me over somewhere else further west in the country, it could have been as many as 50. Had that lawman not got my ass in Virginia that morning, I would have just kept going. I would have done more and more. That was a big part of how I — I don’t want to say, turned my life around. But what I was doing in those days, and those couple of years after I got off the street in New York, I had been living hard like that. Not a winner, just a hard-living singer like Hank Jr., right?
“I was tired,” Crockett goes on. “I had dealt with so many businesspeople. If you can imagine the kind of music businesspeople that I’d been coming across for 10 years, just the shadiest of the shady. Now, they never stopped being shady, but I was really out there with the sharks. I thought that if I hustled hard enough in the ganja farms, that I could stay out of the music business.”
Not long after that, Crockett handed one of his CDs to Evan Felker of Turnpike Troubadours outside of Gruene Hall in New Braunfels, Texas. Felker listened and liked what he heard. In the two years that followed, Crockett opened for Turnpike. Crockett even signed with the same agent that booked Turnpike.
“That traffic stop on 81, that was when I stopped breaking the law,” Crockett says. “I transitioned to bars and got an agent. I’ve been legal ever since.”
Staying legal when you have a felony on your record — not to mention a stock fraud scheme he and his brother were implicated in when Crockett was still a teenager — carries with it a lack of faith in authority. “I thought this was the kind of country where we knew that the only way you could get anybody in the government to do anything to represent us is that we hold them to the fire,” he told the crowd at Austin’s Stubb’s BBQ during a March show, referencing his distrust in state power of all kinds.
“My brother and I had been persecuted by the U.S. government through two administrations,” Crockett tells Rolling Stone, “both a Republican and a Democratic administration. Now, I’m not the kind of person who claims not to trust the government when one party’s in. I don’t trust the government. Never did. My experience was that you can’t trust those kinds of people when you come from a poor background, no matter what — especially if you don’t have the money to buy yourself out of situations or buy your way into those circles.”
It is that same distrust in government, he says, that extends to the ongoing debate in country music over what constitutes “outlaw” versus how the term has been marketed by opportunistic artists. The ones who originally gave rise that label were skeptical of the same authority — whether that be on Music Row or in a government building — that Crockett is today.
“Somebody claimed that I misspoke when I said that pop country was derivative of outlaw country, that I didn’t know what I was talking about. They’re the ones that don’t know what they’re talking about,” he says. “The identity of outlaw — of individualism within country music — is almost entirely from Willie, Waylon, Kristofferson, Cash, Dylan, Hank Jr.”
In the end, Crockett found his kindred spirit in an outlaw scion: Jennings. Whatever Crockett follows his latest missive with, musically, it’s all but certain his producer won’t change. The next-to-last track on Age of the Ram is called “Me & Shooter,” and it’s a tale of late-night weirdness the two seem to find. “With me and Shooter, boys, it’s always Saturday night,” Crockett sings over a fast-tempo drumbeat that could easily be mistaken for one of the fast-moving trains Billy McLane may or may not have hopped.
“I cracked up when I heard it,” Jennings says. “Every time Charley and I end up in L.A., we end up going to some really weird places together at night, and all these random situations. I’m, of course, flattered by the song, but he was just making the point that, with all the other duos on the record, he felt like we were a duo, too.”
Josh Crutchmer is a journalist and author whose book (Almost) Almost Famous is available now via Back Lounge Publishing.
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