COSMIC COWBOYS: Jason Boland & The Stragglers release spellbinding, musical yarn on "The Light Saw Me"

By Andrew W. Griffin / March 22, 2022

ALBUM REVIEW: The Light Saw Me by Jason Boland & The Stragglers (Thirty Tigers) 2021

A few years back, I began researching the 1950’s-era flying saucer/contactee movement, the people – like George Adamski and Frank Stranges – who claimed to be in contact with benign “Space Brothers” claiming that they had come to Earth to warn against nuclear war and man’s inhumanity to man.

One of the researchers I came across – via the works of Trevor James Constable – was Meade Layne. He ran the Borderland Science Research Associates (BSRA). Layne’s work spoke of interdimensional beings from “Etheria,” traveling into our dimension via “ether ships” as a way of explaining the flying saucer craze of the 1950’s.

Not long after studying Meade Layne’s writings, I came across the Desert Oracle magazine and podcast by Ken Layne, out of Joshua Tree, California. After listening to Ken Layne’s show, addressing high weirdness in the high desert – UFO sightings, “Yucca Man,” cults and disappearances – I wondered if the two Layne’s, with their penchant for asking the BIG questions, were related.

While Meade Layne is long dead, Ken Layne confirmed that they are distant cousins. Strange world, we live in. And the Texas/Red Dirt band Jason Boland & The Stragglers, with its roots right here in Oklahoma, have been looking up at the night sky, asking similar questions. And familiar with Ken Layne’s Desert Oracle, they got the campfire-styled storyteller to contribute his wise words on The Light Saw Me.

This is my favorite Stragglers record since way back when (1999 or thereabouts) when the Stillwater boys made a big splash with Pearl Snaps. They get old-time country. They get the past and the present and future and present it all in one wildly-appealing and curious musical package. This new record is Boland at his best.

Basically, The Light Saw Me is a concept album loosely based on the story of the alleged Aurora, Texas UFO crash of 1897, where witnesses claim an alien body was recovered by a farmer, whose windmill had been smashed in the crash. Researching my book, The Stilwell Enigma, I drove to Aurora, Texas – northwest of Fort Worth, in Wise County – I paid a visit to the gravesite of the purported alien. And it is admittedly a strange spot. Something clearly happened there 125 years ago.

In any event, Boland and company – with help from Shooter Jennings, the mystical and musical son of the late Waylon Jennings who helmed Boland’s 2013 record Dark & Dirty Mile – put a ripping yarn together in these rural-route grooves. Broken into three sections, The Light Saw Me is about our deepest loves and fears. A cowboy in 1897 is abducted and ends up 100 years in the future.

But even time and space can’t disconnect us from those we love, which is ultimately the message Boland is communicating, alongside the Stragglers, who provide stellar guitar licks via AJ Slaughter, Nick Worley’s fiddle playing and the rhythms of drummer Jake Lynn and bassist Grant Tracy.

“Come here the tale of a cowboy / raised up in the sky,” Boland sings in his confident, Okie style. You know you are about to be taken on a wild trip. And while this is a concept album, most of the tracks work well on their own, as does “A Tornado & A Fool” which delves into what is real and the meaning of “the writing on the wall,” like the Babylonian king in the Old Testament asking Daniel to interpret the strange writing on the wall. Of course, the king is doomed and the seer, Daniel, knows this. The tornado bearing down on the trailer park is a message and, as the song concludes into a cacophony of musical chaos, the listener is taken up into the puzzling prairie vortex. And that’s just the third track. There are still seven more to go.

 “Transmission Out” and “Transmission In” feature Ken Layne providing a late-night, talk-radio-styled narration, leading into the mid-70s-Jerry-Garcia-wah-wah of “Future.”

“The future ain’t what it used to be / I heard the wise man say.” And there is a lot of truth to that.

Would a late-19th-century cowboy be surprised or dismayed what he encountered in the late 20th century? Or would he simply want to go home to what he knew and loved? When you think about it, Jason Boland & The Stragglers have tapped into the current zeitgeist of the modern west and beyond. With all the chaos and the looming unknown in today’s world, what really matters is coming home and being with loved ones. I think that simple desire is what is at the core of Boland’s compelling sci-fi/country/rock opera.

Keep looking up.

5/5 stars

For more information go to www.thestragglers.com.


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