Jonny Lang “Turn Around”

Jonny Lang has a message for you.

Sure, he’s been in touch before, speaking often with his guitar in the language of deep blues and searing rock & roll. But Turn Around is different. The guitar is still there, whispering sometimes, occasionally even screaming. Now, though, it’s just one voice in a chorus of sounds—the tight band, the passionate singing, and lyrics that conjure beauty as well as pain and speak the truth, all at the same time.

The GRAMMY-nominated, former prodigy instrumentalist, who topped the Billboard New Artist chart with his first album at age 15, stands now as a mature creative force, made more sensitive yet also toughened by life’s adventures. He’s learned what it means to rise above hard times and to find meaning where chaos seemed to rule. These insights, and the emotions they unleash, makes Turn Around the pivotal album of Jonny Lang’s career to date—a passage that links the triumphs of his past to the promise of his future.

A soul-stirring organ, played by GRAMMY-winning producer Shannon Sanders, forecasts the surge of music that follows on Turn Around: the stomping funk of “Bump in the Road,” the startling climax that closes “The Other Side of the Fence,” the electrifying vocal exchanges with Michael McDonald on “Thankful,” and on the opposite extreme, the work-gang chant that drives “Turn Around” and the profound intimacy of “Only a Man.” Turn Around is all of this and more, a tumble of musical colors that dazzle and soothe. And in the end, they achieve coherence through the meaning that Lang conveys so urgently.

“With this album I want to focus, more than ever before, on my purpose in life,” he explains. “I’ve been so incredibly blessed. My wife and I just had our fifth anniversary. I get to do what I love for a living. But it wasn’t so long ago that I was spiraling downward in a lot of ways.” For all the conviction that Lang brings to Turn Around, the album began almost as an afterthought. Lang was in the studio one day with his producer, Ron Fair, who is also president of A&M/Interscope Records. There wasn’t anything pressing on the agenda; they were doing routine work on the final stages of Lang’s previous record, Long Time Coming. Then, out of the blue, Fair said something completely unexpected.