Age of the Ram , the third album Charley Crockett has released in just over a year, comes into focus with the sound of a film projector whirring to life, its soft hum accompanying the Texan troubadour as he croons about the life and times of the outlaw Billy McLane. It’s a double framing device, establishing that Crockett will spend the album following the character, while also placing the music firmly within the tradition of the tall tales of the American West, stories that are handed down through song, dime store novels, and B-movies. Age of the Ram is the concluding chapter in Crockett’s “Sagebrush Trilogy,” and its inspiration is a bit more highfalutin than pulp. The singer-songwriter claims the idea came from somebody at Island Records, his current major-label home after a first act filled with indies. Why not make a series of records, this person suggested, modeled after Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy, the beloved writer’s set of novels about young cowboys in the American Southwest?…