One Foot in Bakersfield, One Foot in the Future

Dwight Yoakam, Brighter Days

Dwight Yoakam’s best music, especially his hits from nearly forty years ago, has always striven to make him sound older than he really is. His 1986 breakthrough single, “Honky Tonk Man,” was a cover of a 1956 Johnny Horton barn-burner, and his best work always strove to sound like Bakersfield, 1960-ish. But sounding older means one thing when you’re thirty; how does he maintain that strategy now at 68?

This, Yoakam’s sixteenth studio album, is emphatically not timeless. Yoakem stages a deliberate callback to his own neo-traditionalist roots, appealing for those who think history has gone badly and want to fix its errors. He channels the twangy, backbeat-heavy Central Valley country music that made him famous. In doing so, he attracts an audience who probably shares my assessment that country music went cockeyed somewhere around 1996.

Despite this, Yoakam avoids the modish cynicism that often accompanies older artists recording nostalgia bait. He’s remarkably optimistic, even on the more melancholy tracks, his expressive sadness often transitory. Perhaps this reflects the two pulls on Yoakam’s artistry: he’s always been artistically (and often ideologically) conservative. But since last recording, he became a father for the first time, at a mere sprightly 63.

So his sound remains retro, but he has a pointed hope for the future. The album opener, “Wide Open Heart,” has the aggressive chomping chords that made both country and rock sound so distinctive in Southern California in 1960. But it’s a love song, full of “She’s all mine to love” and “Come on let’s get it done.” Except it’s love for his carefully restored, chrome-plated street racer car.

Because yeah, Dwight’s old, but he’s young enough to care. This album brims with red-hot emotions for whatever gives Dwight hope enough to keep moving forward. Many seem dedicated to his wife, Emily. (Despite several high-profile relationships in the 1990s, he never married until 2020.) Others are dedicated to music, touring, and a cover of the Carter Family classic “Keep On the Sunny Side,” an ambiguous nod to spirituality.

Dwight Yoakam

The sound remains retro, certainly. He loves crunchy acoustic-electric guitars supplemented with a heavy marmalade of Hammond organ, sounding like something the Wrecking Crew would’ve mass-produced sixty years ago. Most songs maintain a steady 4/4 or 4/6 time; you could line-dance to even the album’s slowest, most navel-gazing tracks. “Can’t Be Wrong” opens with almost the same chords Yoakam used on “Please Please Baby” in 1987.

Yet notwithstanding that conservatism, Dwight sees a brighter future. “A Dream That Never Ends,” with its Laurel Canyon vocal harmonies, implies, despite its title, that love isn’t infinite, and somebody might leave—but he insists he’ll keep believing anyway. “If Only” dreams of what could happen if we shed our carefully constructed cynicism, and includes the eminently quotable line: “If only you’d choose love, love would choose you.”

“California Sky” is perhaps Yoakam’s  most thoroughly engineered track here, with its Tex-Mex guitars and slight nod to fatalism. “Hand Me Down Heart” is exactly what you’d expect from the title, a lament for the suffering he’s previously endured. But instead of surrendering to despair, he presents his heart as something capable of healing, worthy of redemption. Second chances are real in Yoakam’s world.

You might mistake Yoakam’s title track for a love song, with its unifying Tom T. Hall riff, but he wrote it for his son, who closes it with half-gibberish lyrics. “Brighter days are what you promised me,” he sings: optimistic, but with implied consequences if the promise falls through. “Bound Away” laments the touring musician’s life, like CCR’s “Traveling Band,” but with the recognition that “I’m trying to come home, I’m trying to land.”

At nearly an hour, this album runs almost twice conventional LP length. Despite the vinyl revival, Yoakam knows he’ll mostly be streamed or downloaded, and isn’t circumscribed by physical limits. This gives him freedom to play generously with composition and arrangement. Though he doesn’t do anything revolutionary—no Mike Oldfield half-hour experimentation here—he does plumb the full depth of his conservative ethos.

Listening to this album, we’re aware we’re hearing an artist who hasn’t had a Top-40 hit since 2000, and no breakout smash since 1993. His entire career is a nostalgia circuit for aging fans who need reminded why we embraced him so aggressively nearly forty years ago. Yet within that limit, Yoakam expresses an optimism his 1990s recordings sometimes forgot. Dwight’s old, yes, and so am I, but he reminds me that we both still have a future.