| Ryan Bingham has spent most of his life on the road, first on the rough-and-tumble rodeo circuit, then moving from town to town on the equally volatile roadhouse musical circuit. Those travels have given him plenty of material to draw from - and plenty of reason to stop for a moment to dig in his heels and take a stand. That's exactly what the Texas-bred troubadour does on his second Lost Highway album, Roadhouse Sun, a hardscrabble collection that's at once unblinkingly personal and unapologetically political - the latter a new and bracingly vivid addition to Bingham's palette. The expanded consciousness bursts to the surface of several cuts on Roadhouse Sun - nowhere more movingly than on "Dylan's Hard Rain," a stark look into the darker corners of an America in which the storm its namesake sang of has blown through. "With all that's happened politically and economically in the last couple of years, I felt like there was a lot to say," explains the 28-year-old singer-songwriter. "As a young person, I felt like it was time to get involved, to write something that wasn't just about Saturday nights in bars. And as far as Dylan? Things that were happening back then are still happening. Things keep repeating themselves."
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