Simple Motion almost didn't make it to my doorstep. The plastic package holding it and three other review discs arrived torn as if attacked by some savage beast, with a sticker attesting that it was "RECEIVED IN DAMAGED CONDITION," presumably attached at the local post office. Fortunately, the damage seems to have been all external. The three CDs I've listened to at this juncture appear to have escaped the onslaught.

In any event, if it hadn't, I would not have heard this new recording by East Nashville troubadours Eric Brace & Thomm Jutz, which would have made a cold and bitter winter feel even worse. My first listening, however, engendered some confusion. I knew I hadn't heard any of the songs before (14, all written by Brace & Jutz together, solo, or with other collaborators). But that didn't stop them from sounding unsettlingly like something that had been in my life for a long while. Later in the day I realized what it was.

I have searched the print, big and small, without finding any mention of Tom Paxton or suggestion that Motion is intended to be something of a tribute. Still, just about everything I liked about Paxton's approach to songwriting is here: the ghost of older folk music, the benign intelligence, the understated humor, the smart storytelling, the sharp-eyed awareness, the sense of how one celebrates joy and survives sorrow. If you don't know Paxton (who late in a long life is still writing and recording), he's the original singer-songwriter of the early 1960s folk revival, residing and performing in the Village before Dylan got there. Paxton wrote, among other still-loved songs, "The Last Thing on My Mind," which continues to get covered decades after it was composed. Though it's not a country song, it got recorded by Dolly Parton & Porter Wagoner when they were a duo, and it became a hit.

Paxton also famously composed "Ramblin' Boy" and "I Can't Help But Wonder Where I'm Bound," two of the strongest songs to evoke wanderers through the American landscape. Here, Brace's "Ramble," an outstanding song in its own right, takes its inspiration from them, or so I suspect. Ballads such as "Arkansas" (Jutz & Brace, in that order) and the Irish-flavored "Adam & Eve" (Jutz, Brace, Bert Van Mourik) bring to mind Paxton's occasional practice of writing in a traditional voice. The concluding number is Brace's memorable setting to music of a once-famous poem, John Masefield's "Sea Fever."

"Can't Change the Weather" offers up compassionate advice, neither sentimental nor cliched, on how each of us should survive the hard times when they crash into us. If it doesn't put some moisture in your eyes, maybe you're not hearing it right. Jutz wrote it with the late Peter Cooper, Brace's former musical partner, who died too young in December 2022 and to whom the album is dedicated.

In its low-key fashion Simple Motion draws the listener into its world of characters out of both folk song (sailors, gamblers, migrant farm workers) and the 21st-century struggle with situations we all recognize or have experienced ourselves. There are few if any unquiet moments. The singing and the harmonies are calm, and they are also melodic, emotionally compelling and lyrically eloquent enough to take you back for a kind of spiritual comfort rarely available to us anymore. In other words, this isn't much like what you run into in this ever louder, angrier, more frantic country.

Brace and Cooper championed the late Tom T. Hall, whose songwriting gifts were insufficiently appreciated in their estimation (and in mine). Maybe Brace and Jutz are doing something of the same for another Tom. I don't know. All I am certain of is that Simple Motion is as inspired an album as any I've heard in the first half of the first month of the year, with an arguable exception we'll take up later..