Happy 12th birthday to the album that contains some of my favorite Turnpike Troubadours songs.
On this date, the Turnpike Troubadours released their third studio album, Goodbye Normal Street, in 2012. The eleven-track album was named after the street on which the band spent much of their early days, giving the album title a prolific yet literal meaning.
Evan Felker told The Daily Oklahoman right before the album’s release that everyone had moved on to different homes, and their “normal” lives were changing as the band really started to explode.
“We lived on Normal Street when a lot of these songs were written in Tahlequah- or I was crashing on RC’s couch there part of the time. Part of the time I paid rent, so. I was actually a resident.
But it could be applied to the state of mind that we’re in right now with just how crazy things have gotten. It seemed fitting that it was an actual street, and now we’re fixing to get on a tour bus and do more gigs than we’ve ever thought about doing, and life is pretty uprooted… any normalcy that we had is pretty much over with.”
The album was produced by Wes Sharon at 115 Recording in Norman, Oklahoma, and the men in the group wanted to make sure that Sharon captured their true sound as artists.
“The things that you hear on the radio, especially country radio, a lot of times they are just really auto-tuned and lined up perfect, and it lacks any kind of soul to it. It doesn’t really sound like real people are playing it to me.
And we just wanted to give a really good representation of what we are and what we can do as a band.”
I’d say that Goodbye Normal Street does just that as it homes hits like “Good Lord Lorrie,” “Gin, Smoke, Lies,” “Before The Devil Knows We’re Dead,” and “Wrecked.”
I vividly remember hearing “Good Lord Lorrie” for the first time in my senior year of high school when I was touring my alma mater, Oklahoma State University (Go Pokes). Since that moment, the floodgates were opened and I became a Turnpike addict. This album holds a special place in my heart as it truly was my first taste of real red dirt music.
Fire up some of the classics off Goodbye Normal Street today.
“Good Lord Lorrie”
“Wrecked”
“Gin, Smoke, Lies”
