I have to admit: I thought Jamey Johnson might've been a little rusty heading into his comeback. Almost a decade without new music? Fourteen years since his last full length album? It's only natural to not fire on all cylinders. You don't expect a car to fire up immediately after letting it sit for some years. You can't just jumpstart it and expect everything to work good as new. It takes time and effort usually. But the country veteran shakes off all the cobwebs like it's nothing and delivers with some stellar music.
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Recently, Jamey Johnson released his first album in fourteen years, Midnight Gasoline. There, he pens some incredibly stirring material. However, the one that stands out the most is the title track on the album. It's tremendously warm, the guitars swell and throb like a lone wolf howling into the night. Johnson mixes this tender embrace with the sort of yearning that makes country such an irresistible genre. "Burning the midnight gasoline, trying to drive you off my mind. I keep it between the man in the moon and me and these white and yellow lines," Jamey croons. "A thousand miles of letting go down this two lane blacktop road. While you're lighting up the man of your dreams, I'm burning the midnight gasoline."
Jamey Johnson Impresses on His Latest Album Midnight Gasoline
If Jamey Johnson is still such a strong artist, what kept him from releasing more material? The answer seems quite simple really. Part of it is some behind the scenes music industry stuff. In a Rolling Stone interview, he says, "The problem is, I don't trust any of the people that I've worked with so far. I believe they've all hidden the truth from me or lied to me or deceived me in one way or another. Because the end result is that no matter what they said or did or what they said they did, I didn't get paid."
Similarly, Jamey also just didn't have the inspiration he used to have. Touring occupies most of his time anyway, the need to record new music seemed pretty redundant. However, it wasn't until Toby Keith passed that he realized he had more he wanted to say. Johnson tells Billboard, "The writing was already coming back to me, piece by piece, but I still didn't have any ambitions on making a record. When Toby passed away, it moved everything into high gear because I realized that that was the end of his discography, that we weren't getting another Toby Keith record.
And that's what drove me to wanting to finish my own discography. It's what made me understand that I'm nowhere near done, and so it's time to get busy. After he passed away, I immediately started talking about this session and started trying to get all the particulars in order," Jamey adds.
