jason boland

Like a transmission from a celestial CB radio, Jason Boland’s The Light Saw Me crackles to life with a garble of white noise that slows to a fiddle crawl and simmers there, hovering in the interstitial space between psychedelic country and barroom honky-tonk — and that’s just the first minute. On the record’s freewheeling prelude, “Terrifying Nature,” Boland’s narrator engages with the ageless, persistent question: What if we’re not alone in the universe? A query that sets off the unlikely trajectory of a sci-fi country concept album. As the far-fetched tale begins to unfold, what might seem like a strange juxtaposition to most folks, instead, amounts to a mid-career magnum opus for the Oklahoma songwriter and his band, The Stragglers. The gist: An 1890s cowboy is abducted by aliens and en...