07/11/2026
Clovis
I stepped quickly out of an apartment door in Clovis, New Mexico, toward Charley Crockett, my phone held out in my hand playing "Early Morning Rain" by Bill Emerson and Cliff Waldron on the cloudy early evening of the fourth day of recording Charley's seventeenth album โClovisโ. We are in Clovis, New Mexico at one of the creators of Rock 'N' Roll, Norman Petty's legendary studio with the core members of Charley's excellent band The Blue Drifters, his wife Taylor Grace, their dog Billie and Charley's crew. We are ragged already and we're supposed to pack it up and go back to L.A. tomorrow.
We booked this place for four days intending to capture some pieces to start an album that we'd finish back in Los Angeles, but now, 4 days in with 8 songs in the can, we aren't done, and everybody knows it. Half the crew has Covid. Out of desperation for a laugh, we've lovingly renamed it "Clovid". Charley got Clovid first on the second day of tracking. He worked through it like a snowplow barrels through snow. A true ram. Everybody's flights and hotels in Los Angeles are already booked for tomorrow, and we're down to the line.
Charley has made the tentative play for us to return to Sunset Sound in Hollywood tomorrow, as planned, work on the material and then come back in a week or so to record more in Clovis. I'm feeling like we are in our stride and we just have to push through. So I make the case for staying two more days instead and just finishing it out. This also means traveling all day on Charley's 42nd birthday when I know his wife has a big surprise party planned for him back in Los Angeles that day. Essentially it's a wrecking ball to everybody's plans. But, too much was on the line. Charley agreed with me. Earlier in the day I'd already called my wife Misty to say I'm sorry and inform her that I had a plan to stay two days longer. Not happy, she not so affectionaly told me she was booking a session to dye her hair pink like she'd been wanting for a long time. I have to pick my battles.
Back outside the apartment, as I'm approaching Charley with this song blaring from my phone, he's in the middle of the chaos of pulling the trigger on the new plan. Letting the wrecking ball fly. Sometimes when I'm working on music and I get stuck, I'll take a break and listen to some music that's totally different than what we're working on, just to see if I can find some inspiration for some new ideas. I'd recently met Billy Corgan and we'd bonded over our love of some really cool '60s and '70s music, and he'd played the song for me. There was a chord change in it that I wanted Charley to hear that I thought might be cool to incorporate into the song "Last Night at the Alamo".
Charley and I had already spent six hours today on "Last Night at the Alamo" trying to get it written, arranged, and ready for the band to start cutting takes. On โClovisโ, sometimes it was me and Charley writing in the apartment. Sometimes it was bassist Kyle Madrigal, Charley, and I. Or sometimes one of our two fantastic drummers, Jay Moeller bringing his wit and sly humor to the songs. Charley always brings Jay and his touring drummer Mayo Valdez along and they tag in and out of songs.
"Last Night at the Alamo" has been haunting Charley for the entire time we've been in Clovis. The song was really important to him and he wanted it to make the album. Taylor and Charley had worked on it before they got to Clovis and had gotten the idea figured out, but no matter how much we struggled with it, we couldn't get the music to fit the emotion we felt in the lyrics. Even with the frustration that comes with that and the stress of the giant plan change, and in spite of the descending cloud of chaos from the mountains high above him, Charley Crockett is still visible.
Charley is one of my best friends. I've known him a long time, but the friendship really deepened greatly once we got into my studio in Los Angeles for our first album together: "Lonesome Drifter". Charley has been fighting a fight as long as I've known him. At many times, two or three fights at the same time. And it usually always centers around his creative control and his ability to release his music when he wants. There's a mode with Charley when all of this chaos is descending upon him: he'll take off into the mountains in a truck with a guitar by himself and write. Then after a few days, he'll come back down from the mountain and go back to his life, the road, centered and fresh with his resolve topped off. What's different about Clovis is that it feels like Charley is in that mountain mode while he's here with all of us, in this legendary studio.
Norman Petty's studio was built in the 1950s, and Norman recorded all of the Buddy Holly records there as well as Roy Orbison, Bobby Fuller, The Fireballs and many more. Norman had a whole record label and publishing company in the building. On September 10th, 1958 Buddy Holly and Norman produced two songs on a nineteen-year-old Waylon Jennings. Needless to say, I feel ethereally connected to the place we are in. It's been closed to recordings since 1969 and in recent years, it has just been a preserved museum of sorts for private tours. A lot of the gear was still working, the microphones worked beautifully. Norman's 'Green Machine' Wurlitzer, which he used for all his sessions was in pristine condition for Kullen Fox to play. We were using Buddy Holly's 1952 Fender Amp for Charley's guitar and a 1959 Neumann M49 mic on his vocals. Kyle, who really got very, very sick with the Clovid during this and still pushed through, was playing Norman's bass that was there in the studio. There was a celeste and several antique synthesizers sitting around that all worked. David Spreng, the engineer I work with on most everything I do, and Ron did a great job getting it all up and running and, by the hand of fate and our lucky stars, the three of us didn't get sick.
Clovis is a wild town. It's wide and it's flat. It's right across the border from West Texas so to get there from Los Angeles, you've got to fly to Lubbock, Texas and then drive highway 84 West from Lubbock straight to Clovis. Along the way you'll pass Littlefield, Texas, hometown to, none other than, Waylon Jennings. W**d is also legal in Clovis and there's a drive-thru dispensary on almost every corner of the town. Word had gotten around that Charley was in town recording and people were calling and inquiring about it. The studio is a national landmark and very famous in its own right. While we were there, they had a pretty steady flow of folks who were just fans of Norman and Buddy Holly who would stop by throughout the week and see if they could get a tour.
The studio is like a movie set. Every room of the building is period correct for the '60s. It's breathtaking. It's like walking into another time and place. The air is thick and colorful with the energy of the past and the history. Photos of all the young artists that recorded there adorn the walls. All of Norman's stuff is around. Awards. Ledgers. Personal photographs. The accounting logs are still in the desk drawer under the pre-amps. It's untouched. The minute I walked into the studio for the first time I felt this overwhelming warm emotion and a sense of calm take over my body. I knew immediately that there was no way we weren't leaving here with something really special. I stood in the main room of the studio for a moment by myself and realized that I was standing right where my father stood at nineteen years old recording "Jole Blon" with Buddy and my eyes welled up as I felt an immense sense of excitement fill my body. At nineteen I was still living in Nashville and preparing to move to Los Angeles the next year. I feel so many universes apart from that person at this point in my life, but yet here, there was a connection. The weight of the situation hit me all at once and at that point, Clovis took over.
It's definitely by the convergence of luck, fate and this shared history that the folks at Norman Petty's have agreed to let Charley and I be the first people to record in this sacred place in a very long time. It's not even my doing that we are in this place. Charley had wanted to record in this studio for a decade, but he was always told it wasn't an option. The guy who got the job done is a dude I've never even met named Texas Joe. Apparently he talked to Charley about the studio and then emailed Ron Skinner, who works at the studio, on our behalf without telling anybody. They said yes and now we're four days and eight songs in and counting on recording at least two songs a day for the rest of our stay and this first song of the day has taken forever.
Charley turns and hears that song playing on my phone and as his manager rushes off to release the wrecking ball, Charley walks over to the table outside the side sliding-window entrance of Norman Petty's studio, picks up his guitar and sings "Last Night at the Alamo" exactly like you hear it on the album. A version totally different from what we were working on in the apartment, he just worked all the words out on the spot. He played the whole song right there in front of us in one performance as the sky, with the sun almost totally gone, beat down a deep blue on The Blue Drifters. The band had all patiently waited six hours for us to emerge with another song to start recording, and they all witnessed this moment happen right there. It was like magic. It was conjuration. And as the sun disappeared, the chaos cloud around Charley completely dissipated and we all headed into the studio to get to our stations and try to capture this song as quickly as possible.
This was the feeling of making this album every day. There was a sense of a wind at our backs that guided us to shore day after day. We all put our hearts into it, lots of us wrote on it, and in six days we'd captured 13 songs.
On Charley's 42nd Birthday, Charley, Taylor, Billie and I rode Charley's bus back home to California where I returned to my loving, pink-haired wife, to whom I promptly gave Clovid. She's still mad.
We took โClovisโ into my Snake Mountain studio to put the finishing touches on it. Alexis Sanchez and Nathan Flemming from The Blue Drifters were there as well as Dave "Leroy" Biller and Jack "Waylon" Montesinos for additional guitars. I wanted to button it up, mix it and get out the door so Charley would have another full round of ammo in his revolver ready to see where the wind of โClovisโ takes him. However, when we began to try and fill the holes, we realized we didn't really need to add much. The more we added to it, the more we covered up Clovis. It was there right in front of us.
Clovis.
To wrap this whole thing up, I ended up making one of the most important records in my life with Charley and I wanted to tell you the story of how it came to be. We all were different after Clovis. And, perhaps as a cosmic explanation point to the whole deal, on the day that we finished the last mixes of the album, we woke up to the news that they had played Charley's song "Lonesome Drifter" on the morning that the astronauts in the Artemis II returned to earth.
