Jason Boland & The Stragglers

JASON BOLAND & THE STRAGGLERS

“This album is a mirror,” says Jason Boland. “It’s a retrospective, a reflection of everywhere we’ve been and everything we’ve learned over the last 25 years on the road.”

The Last Kings Of Babylon—Boland’s eleventh studio album with his longtime band, The Stragglers—is no nostalgia trip, though. Recorded with legendary producer Lloyd Maines, the collection finds Boland and the band continuing to evolve, pushing sonic boundaries and challenging genre conventions even as they embrace history and tradition. The songwriting is bold and muscular here, filtering classic country through a kaleidoscopic lens of rock, punk, bluegrass, and folk, and the performances are raw and exhilarating to match, captured live on the studio floor in just two whirlwind days of basic tracking. The result is a timeless offering from a group of master craftsmen at the top of their game, a joyful, honest snapshot of a working band 25 years into their unlikely—and unstoppable—career. 

“These songs are about the journey,” Boland reflects. “We were searching for something when we started this band, and we’re still out there searching for it now.” 

Born and raised in Oklahoma, Boland grew up listening to a mix of country and rock and roll before eventually finding himself at the epicenter of the Red Dirt scene in Stillwater, where he put together the Stragglers while attending OSU. Beginning with 1999’s Pearl Snaps, the hard-touring band would release a series of critically acclaimed independent albums that would rack up more than half a million sales, lead to collaborations with the likes of Shooter Jennings and Robert Earl Keen, and land performances everywhere from Cain’s Ballroom to the Grand Ole Opry. The New York Times called Boland “one of the country scene’s most multidimensional songwriters,” while American Songwriter praised him as “a troubadour for the ages,” and Rolling Stone hailed him as a “steady, reliable source of smart, gritty songwriting.”

Reliable? Yes. Predictable? Hardly. Boland’s path included an endless series of twists and turns over the years, both personally and professionally, as he battled addiction, recovered from a nearly career-ending vocal cord injury, and redefined the possibilities of the Red Dirt sound he’s become synonymous with. Boland’s latest album, 2021’s The Light Saw Me, was a sci-fi concept record declared by SPIN to be one of the “best and most surprising, left-field country albums of the year.”

“After making a narrative, story-driven album like that, it just felt natural to do something more autobiographical this time around,” Boland explains. “We wanted to make something that would really embody who we are as a band at this point in our evolution.”

Given that Maines had produced The Stragglers’ debut all those years ago, it made perfect sense to tap the revered studio wiz and multi-instrumentalist for The Last Kings Of Babylon, which serves as both a return to form and a major step forward in the band’s development.

“Our music has always been rooted in the folk tradition,” Boland reflects, “but with this album we figured out how to bring a little more power and intensity to the songs. We’ve reached another level as performers where we can push ourselves and our instruments while still staying true to who we are, which is a really exciting place to be.”

That excitement is palpable on The Last Kings Of Babylon, which opens with the loping “Next To Last Hank Williams.” Like much of the record, the song is both bittersweet and wryly funny, painting a portrait of a road-weary musician who bears more than a passing resemblance to Boland as he makes it his way through a modern world that makes less and less sense each day. “Every generation has it figured / Then in the middle of the game the rules have changed,” Boland sings in his easygoing baritone. “We all agree the mystery is bigger / Meanwhile that money stays the same / And the search is on for anyone to blame.”

“That song inspired the album title, which had me thinking about this idea of Babylon as a kind of mystical time and place where beauty and craft really mattered,” Boland reflects. “It had me thinking of an era when things were ornate because they had to be, when art was made to last. The Stragglers have made a lot of ‘wrong’ decisions over the years, but I like to think we’ve always done it for the right reasons.” 

Such musings lay at the heart of The Last Kings Of Babylon, which often transforms seemingly ordinary slice-of-life scenes into larger existential meditations. The rousing “Truest Colors” turns a searing indictment of the music business into a rumination on karma; the intoxicating “High Time” contemplates the nature of freedom while toasting the girl who brought the W**d; and the rollicking “Farmall” wraps a reflection on social, political, and technological progress into the story of a vintage tractor. Even when he’s zooming out to look at the bigger picture, though, Boland’s writing always remains grounded in the deeply personal. The playful “One Law At A Time,” for instance, recounts the oldest rule in the Stragglers’ playbook (“Don’t break more than one law at a time”), while the waltzing “Irish Goodbye” explores Boland’s impulse to slip away from social situations before anyone has noticed, and the breezy “Take Me Back To Austin” celebrates the place—and person—he loves the most.

“My wife and I lived in Austin when we first got together, and then we moved out into the country in Texas, where it can be pretty boring,” Boland explains. “People expect with how much time I spend on the road that I’d want to come home and kick my shoes off when I finally get a break, but all we ever want to do is head right back into Austin and catch a band.”

The album’s cover songs reflect fundamental aspects of Boland’s personality, too. The slow-burning “Drive” (penned by Jason Eady, Jamie Lynn Wilson and Kelley Mickwee) ponders if we can ever really outrun the past as it rolls down an endless highway; a scorching blues/psych-rock take on Randy Crouch’s “Ain’t No Justice” finds escape from the cruelty of the world in the arms of a lover; and the gorgeous “Buffalo Return” (written by the late Jimmy LaFave) closes the record with dose of hope, promising that transcendence is possible for those who live their lives outside the confines of conventional society.

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