Album Review – Chasen Wayne’s “The Diamond Saloon”

Cosmic Country (#563), Country Concept Albums (#565) and Western (#512) on the Country DDS.

Austin, TX-based artist Chasen Wayne and his band The Honky Tonk Machine are patently uninterested in simply making conventional country music. They’re seeking to reach uncharted territory along the frontier of everything that music can be. It might even be more appropriate to talk about their new project called The Diamond Saloon in terms of being a multi-disciplinary work that encompasses a literary vision brought to a cinematic landscape rendered in a sonic presentation as opposed to an “album.”

Concept albums and song cycles certainly are ambitious and uncommon in country music, but they not entirely rare, especially the 1800’s Western trope that now even Shaboozey has tapped into. Chasen Wayne’s The Diamond Saloon might be set in the barren and unforgiving landscape of West Texas and evoke geography with the best of them. But the story takes you much further off the beaten path, even if there’s still plenty of blood involved.

This is the story of two brothers named Ricky and Rex from the small and desolate town of Van Horn, TX. They own a bar called The Diamond Saloon that struggles to keep the take above the bills, while having to keep the rough and tumble local population from destroying the place on a nightly basis. Rex is ultimately the caretaker, trying to keep the business afloat. Ricky on the other hand finds it hard to stick around with that long Mexican border stretching off in the distance, and the high risk/high reward opportunities that can come with crossing it.

The way Chasen Wayne cites literary influences for the album like Cormac McCarthy novels right beside expansive progressive rock performers like Pink Floyd, this tells you this isn’t going to be a conventional listening experience. But ultimately, this is still a country music album through and through, even if jazz disciplines and novel chord structures make it a country album like no other. In what is Chasen’s third album in as many years, he and the Honky Tonk Machine have created a sound wholly unique to themselves, and one that puts you in a chilled, faraway, dream-like state when listening.

We’ll try to avoid any major spoilers here, but what transpires in the three parts of The Diamond Saloon involves a lot of action, blood, intrigue, as well as a love story. The key to a great concept album is to accomplish the intended immersive experience—which Chasen Wayne and the band do well here—while also delivering individual tracks that can live on their own to draw in listeners and keep them attentive even if their uninterested in the deeper narrative. Songs like “The Diamond Saloon,” “Morning Light,” “Another Dusty Road,” and “Ricky’s Shift” certainly accomplish this.

Chasen Wayne has always had this ambitious vision to album making and carving out his own sound in country. You heard that in his 2024 album Strange Places, and it was brought into sharper focus with the conceptualized CORPUS from 2025. But the scope of what Chasen was attempting to accomplish sometimes outpaced the capabilities of his collaborators, or the capacity or budget of the recording process. The Diamond Saloon is where these challenges are overcome. And even though the album comes with just a bit of a burnt edge aspect to it, this helps set the mood perfectly like the sepia sky of a Taylor Sheridan flick.

There’s such great instrumentation and buy-in from the Honky Tonk Machine on this record that now has enough time together both in the studio and on the road to know where the grooves are and how to lay down in them. Jamey Maness on pedal steel guitar, Jared Standish on fiddle/violin, Alex Riegelman on electric guitar, Conner Church on drums, and Will Felty on bass and harmony vocals bring Chasen Wayne’s vision to life. Wayne wrote the album himself, with some assistance from Jamey Maness.

Jordan Hillman also appears on the album on piano for the interludes, as does Denis O’Donnell as the narrator of the story. O’Donnell is an Austin legend both as a musician, and the co-owner of bars like The White Horse (previously) and Sagebrush. Though it takes a certain listener to be down with such a novel approach to country as the one presented in The Diamond Saloon, if a band like Rattlesnake Milk that also emerged from Austin can become unlikely national headliners, so perhaps can Chasen Wayne and the Honky Tonk Machine. And after the release of The Diamond Saloon, they deserve to.

8.5/10

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