The 2025 Saving Country Music Artist of the Year

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The end of the year and the beginning of the next is a great moment for deep reflection, house cleaning of the mind, goal setting in life, and taking advantage of being able to look forward at a new year as an opportunity to reset priorities, expand possibilities, and pursue dreams with renewed vigor. For many of us, the promises we make ourselves at the start of a new year will go unfulfilled. But even if a few of those resolutions can be adhered to, we’ll count them as victories.

We often look up to our musical heroes and find inspiration in them for all they’ve accomplished, but rarely because they’re perfect. Often, they’re just as flawed as the rest of us. Even more often, they’re even more flawed, with their right brain tendencies making them more prone to addiction and social anxieties, exacerbated by public adulation and financial success as opposed to tempered by them. At times these tendencies have become existential, and even fatal for musical performers.

These issues almost became fatal for Oklahoma’s Turnpike Troubadours beginning in late 2018 when singer, frontman, and primary songwriter Evan Felker started letting issues with alcohol result in poor performances and cancelled shows. The previous year, the Turnpike Troubadours had been named the 2017 Saving Country Music Artist of the Year in the wake of their album A Long Way From Your Heart.

But despite widespread critical acclaim, the Turnpike Troubadours were struggling to resonate beyond the border of the Texas/Red Dirt scene. It felt like a burden was descending on their shoulders to break through, or perennially become journeyman musicians constantly having to be on the road to make it. 12 performances in total were cancelled in 2018, with rumors swirling about Felker’s mental state. The Troubadours did return to the stage in Austin on November 30th, and put on a solid show heading into the Holidays and the new year, giving fans a renewed hope.

But hope that the new year would see the Felker and the Turnpike Troubadours return to top form were dashed when more cancelled tour dates emerged. Eventually, the band announcing an indefinite hiatus on May 31st, 2019, and cancelled all remaining appearances. Here was one of the premier bands in independent country and Red Dirt on the skids, with folks seriously worried about the future of Evan Felker irrespective of the fate of the Turnpike Troubadours.

Felker has always been a difficult artist to assess since he’s the front person of a band as opposed to a solo performer. If it was his name on marquees and album covers, he might be regarded in the same vein of the greatest songwriters like Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt. The songs of the Turnpike Troubadours catalog are of that caliber, even if they’re shared to the world as the offerings from a country rock band.


That perspective has never come into sharper focus than in 2025 with the release of Turnpike’s The Price of Admission. When you can compose an album that comes this close to universal acclaim—and includes not one, but two songs that feel generational in “On The Red River” and “Heaven Passing Through”—you open up such all-time conversations.

But Artist of the Year is not based off of any specific musical measure or output. It’s given to the artist who inspires us the most, who opens up new possibilities for independent music, who expounds upon the virtues of the country genre and the imperative importance of songwriting to it, and who moves the music in the most positive direction.

The Turnpike Troubadours have always been a supergroup and remain so, including through the songwriting contributions of bassist RC Edwards, and fiddle player Kyle Nix. Along with guitarist Ryan Engleman, multi-instrumentalist Hank Early, and drummer Gabriel Pearson, they share in this distinction with Evan Felker, making them all now two-time Saving Country Music Artist of the Year winners.

But it is Evan Felker, who through his vanquishing of demons and overcoming of adversity to not just steer his life back on track, but to become the best version of himself 18 years into his career, and find the pinnacle of his powers through song and performance—this is what makes him the very deserving 2025 Artist of the Year.

Just don’t let it go to your head, old chap.

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© 2025 Saving Country Music

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