Dwight Yoakam, Country Rebel, Has a New Attitude

With the sun setting over the vast expanse of Los Angeles, Dwight Yoakam sighed softly as tears rolled down his cheeks. For a moment, the scene played like one of his own portraits of honky-tonk heartache and regret. But sitting in the country star’s 12th-story offices above the Sunset Strip, it became clear that the emotion gripping him was not sadness, but joy.

Forty years ago this month, Yoakam arrived with his debut, the indie EP “Guitars, Cadillacs, Etc., Etc.” The record — later expanded to a full-length — helped shake country music from its mid-1980s doldrums while starting a career filled with more than a dozen Top 10 radio hits and six platinum albums, even as Yoakam took a rebel stance, operating largely outside the Nashville establishment.

At 68, as he prepares to release his 18th studio album, and his first on his own label, the ambitious Yoakam has found meaning in something other than his career: his wife, the photographer Emily Joyce, whom he quietly married during the pandemic, and their 4-year-old son, Dalton.

“I’ve known the two of them since before I ever met them,” Yoakam said, drying his eyes. “Not to get overly metaphysical, but our connection in the universe, to one another, precedes us and will continue beyond us.”

The vibe shift is evident on “Brighter Days,” (out Nov. 15), his first album of original material in nearly a decade, where Yoakam’s music takes on a sun-dappled optimism. It features a twangy, pedal-steel-laden track with Post Malone, a fan turned friend and collaborator who likewise made his name outside of country’s embrace.