Gasoline Lollipops - All the Misery Money Can Buy (2020)

Gasoline Lollipops make country music for folks who prefer outlaws to cowboys, alt-rock for people who loathe hipsters, and Americana for those who admit that America never was great. And the best way to understand where the Boulder-based group gets its sound is to get acquainted with frontman Clay Rose. Growing up between Boulder and Tennessee, the son of a country songwriter and a pot-growing truck driver (his parents connected through a mutual client — none other than Willie Nelson), Rose naturally embodies the authentic spirit of wanderlust that other artists spend years cultivating. Doing stints in psych wards and jails as a young adult until he became sober and met his now-wife, Rose has lived a life ripped from song lyrics, and as he tells it, it's impacted Gasoline Lollipops' music "in every way possible."

"It was one of those upbringings where very, very often I would wake up in the morning and I wouldn't know what state I was in. And so looking for something to ground you in that kind of an environment, you have to look internally, or ethereally, and so music was something that grounded me," Rose explains. "No matter what state or what culture we were in, it was one of those thirty albums playing on the tape deck. The cab of the truck and the music — that was home. To this day, when I get homesick, it's not for a particular geographic location. It's for a certain interstate and an album."

Eventually that little boy in the cab of his dad's truck grew up, took a hard look around, and wrote a collection of biting elegies for the country he witnessed. On Gasoline Lollipops' latest album, All the Misery Money Can Buy, Rose and the rest of the gang (current roster: Kevin Matthews on drums, Bradley "Bad Brad" Morse on bass, Scott Coulter on keyboard and organ, and Donny Ambory on guitar) take listeners on a road trip through the American South, stopping not at tourist attractions, but rather the small towns off the beaten path. This, says Rose, is where the cracks in America's foundation are most exposed: poverty, misogyny, racism, selfishness, inequality and greed.