As Charley Crockett drove out of the depths of Death Valley into a field of Joshua trees, the snow began to swirl. He had just finished a tour in Arizona, sent his bus back to Texas, and rented a car, taking the back roads as he headed West. Moving into the high desert, the storm broke, revealing the unruly peaks of the Eastern Sierra. Whitney Portal stood before him, reaching its jagged and rocky edges heavenward, or at least toward the summit of Mount Whitney, the highest point in the lower 48.

“I had a vision right then and there that I needed to do something,” the country-blues musician from South Texas says months later, after he had already turned that vision into his latest record, Welcome to Hard Times.

“I had this viewpoint of this drifter kind of appearing in those Joshua trees with those snow-capped High Sierra in the background on this journey,” he says. “And that’s where the idea was born.”

The scene spoke to Crockett of transcendence, of a journey not bound by the starkness of good and evil, but full of nuance, complexity, conflict and resolution. It reminded Crockett of spaghetti westerns popularized in the 1960s — raw, gritty, often recalcitrant, heroes facing the rugged frontier juxtaposed to classic western films with “squeaky clean characters” facing off with “obvious bad men.”

“One of the interesting things about the emergence of those kind of flawed characters [in spaghetti westerns], is that they were more complex, which become more relatable to the people watching it, because life puts you in certain circumstances, and you never know what’s going to happen,” Crockett says.

Welcome to Hard Times is as much Crockett’s own story, as any dreamt up character, his own life melding with the drifter in his mind’s eye.

Read more here.