See Turnpike Troubadours’ Tense ‘Tornado Warning’ on ‘Austin City Limits’

Austin City Limits finishes its 43rd season this weekend, wrapping up with a February 17th double-header featuring Turnpike Troubadours and Chris Stapleton.

In the video above, Turnpike Troubadours bring their opening set to a close with “A Tornado Warning.” One of three televised songs originally featured on the band’s newest release A Long Way From Your Heart, the tune finds the Red Dirt country-rockers in fiery form, brewing up their own cyclone of fiddle, pedal steel and Telecaster guitar. At the center of the mix is the Troubadours’ leader Evan Felker, whose closed-eyed stance at the microphone embodies the calm before the storm.

“There’s country music in the kitchen, I hear it singing through the screen, weather warnings in between,” he sings during the second verse, setting the stage for a twister whose arrival interrupts an otherwise smooth evening with a loved one.

Formed in the Ozark foothills of Oklahoma, the Troubadours have seen their share of bad weather blow its way across the South Central states, where the band cemented an early audience with near-constant touring. That said, this brush with disaster may be a work of fiction.

“[My songwriting] comes from life, but not necessarily things that happen to me directly,” Felker told Rolling Stone Country last year. “I’d lead a pretty tragic life if everything I’d ever written had happened to me.”