It’s Been a Long Road, But Nothing Like This: Dwight at 68

Forty years ago this month, Yoakam arrived with his debut, the indie EP “Guitars, Cadillacs, Etc., Etc.” The record – later expanded to a full-length – helped shake country music from its mid-1980s doldrums while starting a career filled with more than a dozen Top 10 radio hits and six platinum albums, even as Yoakam took a rebel stance, operating largely outside the Nashville establishment.
At 68, as he prepares to release his 18th studio album, and his first on his own label, the ambitious Yoakam has found meaning in something other than his career: his wife, the photographer Emily Joyce, whom he quietly married during the pandemic, and their 4-year-old son, Dalton.
“I’ve known the two of them since before I ever met them,” Yoakam said, drying his eyes. “Not to get overly metaphysical, but our connection in the universe, to one another, precedes us and will continue beyond us.”
The vibe shift is evident on “Brighter Days,” (out Nov. 15), his first album of original material in nearly a decade, where Yoakam’s music takes on a sun-dappled optimism. It features a twangy, pedal-steel-laden track with Post Malone, a fan turned friend and collaborator who likewise made his name outside of country’s embrace.
“There’s certainly a feeling of things coming full circle,” Yoakam said. “But I’ve always had a sense of fate, or maybe some guardian angel nudging me along to where I find myself now.”

An interview with Yoakam is less like a conversation than a dazzling one-man show. Over the course of three pinballing hours, he offered up an impression of Marlon Brando, recited Henry Fonda’s “Grapes of Wrath” monologue, sang snatches of his favorite Monkees songs and explained how Dust Bowl migration patterns affected West Coast country music, all while weaving in references to the ’50s child preacher Marjoe Gortner and the ’80s standup comedian Sam Kinison. Yoakam’s myriad passions and dizzying digressions have found a home on the Bakersfield Beat, his satellite radio channel for SiriusXM.
“Dwight’s an encyclopedia,” said the former Warner Bros. president Lenny Waronker, an early mentor, adding that the singer “knows something about everything, and he’s always poured that knowledge into his music, or whatever he does.”
A coal country intellectual, the Kentucky-born, Ohio-raised Yoakam arrived in Los Angeles in 1977, a rawboned 21-year-old “just lookin’ for a hit,” as he would later title a best-of collection. Seven years of hard graft followed, as Yoakam shaped his vision and defiantly refused to play the era’s hot songs with his bar band, sticking to classics by his heroes Merle Haggard, Buck Owens and Bill Monroe. “That got us kicked out of plenty of places,” he recalled.

In the early ’80s, Yoakam built his career from biker dives in the recesses of the San Fernando Valley to the hip Palomino Club in North Hollywood. His puckish energy and hot-wired sound endeared him to the post-punk scene, where he shared bills with X, the Blasters and Hüsker Dü. In between there were visits to Nashville and rejections from record companies that had embraced a syrupy version of country. “What I was doing was so hillbilly,” he said, “it seemed like rock ’n’ roll to them.”
The six-song “Guitars, Cadillacs Etc., Etc.” made him one of the most buzzed-about acts in the business, and in a rare deal, Warner’s Reprise Nashville label granted him complete control of his career — letting him pick the producer, players and even the artwork for his albums.
Aided by the guitarist and producer Pete Anderson, Yoakam’s well-defined visual aesthetic — skintight jeans, low-slung Stetson silverbelly — and a surfeit of songs in his back pocket put him on a fast track to stardom, part of country’s late-’80s New Traditionalist wave. His next three albums — “If There Was a Way,” “This Time” and “Gone” — incorporated smoldering R&B, lush pop, even psychedelia, and cemented him as the rare country star who retained a sense of rock ’n’ roll cool.
“There was nobody else who could appeal to mainstream country fans, get played on country radio, and yet still have this following among rock fans and punk fans,” said the writer and critic Don McLeese, author of a 2012 biography of the musician.
But as the new millennium dawned, Yoakam’s continued experimentation led to diminishing returns on the country charts, and he split with Reprise in 2003, after 17 years. A second career as an actor took off in the mid-90s, following a breakout role as the abusive alcoholic Doyle Hargraves in Billy Bob Thornton’s 1996 film, “Sling Blade.”
With music on the back burner, he turned his focus to “South of Heaven, West of Hell,” an existential Western he wrote, directed, starred in and scored. It was released in 2000 and promptly became a commercial and critical flop, a rare professional misstep that left Yoakam reeling. Undeterred, he said that he is developing another period Western, a series this time, with Thornton set to executive produce.
“Dwight is in the best place he’s ever been in since I’ve known him,” Thornton, a friend, said in an interview. “I think he’s found a sense of peace.”
Music always beckoned, and in the early 2000s, Yoakam set about recalibrating. He broke up with his longtime producer Anderson and began producing his albums himself, releasing them on various indie labels until 2011, when he returned to Warner for a pair of immediate and adventurous LPs, “3 Pears” and “Second Hand Heart.”
“Brighter Days” completes a latter-day trilogy of sorts. It has the feel of a classic Yoakam record — including interpretations of songs by the Carter Family, the Byrds and Cake — but it’s likely the most collaborative effort in his catalog.
Over the years, Yoakam has co-written only sparingly, but six of the new album’s tracks were composed with a contingent of stalwart country songsmiths led by Jeffrey Steele, an outgrowth of some pandemic-lockdown-era sessions. “I’d never done that kind of writing, the collaborative group thing,” Yoakam said. “But I said, ‘Sure, I’ll jump on Zoom and give it a try.”
He recorded the songs between 2021 and late 2023, and was about to master the album earlier this year when learned that Post Malone was eager to appear on the project. The two had met when the pop hitmaker appeared on Yoakam’s radio show in 2018, spurring a friendship just as the younger star began planning his transition into country.
Inspired — “or maybe just under pressure to come up with something good,” Yoakam cracked — he quickly knocked out two songs while driving around running errands with his family, eventually combining the separate tunes into “I Don’t Know How to Say Goodbye (Bang Bang Boom Boom),” a charmingly shaggy duet that became the first release off “Brighter Days.”
Though heartbreak remains Yoakam’s lyrical stock in trade, the album offers a sense of his newfound domestic bliss, particularly in the devotional “I Spell Love” and the title track, which features an appearance by his son. “The first couple years, he came to a lot of my shows and stood on the side stage,” Yoakam said. “He’d be there with his little Telecaster ukulele playing along. It’s kind of eerie what he observes and what he imitates.”
In September, as Yoakam accepted the Americana Music Association’s lifetime achievement award in Nashville, he grew emotional thanking his wife and son for coming into his life. “That was the first time I’d ever really articulated that,” he said. “Maybe that’s what got to me that night.”
During the speech, Yoakam also reminded the audience that he has never been nominated for a Country Music Association award. His enduring status as a Nashville outsider doesn’t augur well for Yoakam’s immediate prospects of entering the Country Music Hall of Fame.
“If I’m ever acknowledged in that way, it would be a great honor,” he said, smiling. “But I’m living for something much bigger these days.”