On Promised Land, his second full-length album, Irish-born and -bred musician Danny Burns offers up familiar contents in an original package. Unusually, however, he is not a singer-songwriter as is nearly every other of his contemporaries in the acoustic-guitar business. This alone endears him to me. A mixture of folk (Irish and American), bluegrass and reworked pop, the album is one of those always welcome recordings that a listener finds him- or herself liking more with each successive exposure.

In other words, though its pleasures won't immediately overwhelm your ears, they will work their way quietly to a spot on your psychic jukebox.

Burns' Irish roots are most audible in a couple of ballad-group chestnuts, "Danny Boy" -- of which the best to be said is that worse versions abound -- and Ewan MacColl's slightly less often visited "Dirty Old Town" as well as Gordon Sumner's "Fields of Gold," new to me (at least imperfect memory attests as much). The album opens -- so I read here, not being fluent in her music -- with an Adele cover, "Someone Like You," and, later and more interestingly, Oasis's "Some Might Say" translates easily into bluegrass.

Promised Land claims bluegrass, though, more as an occasional influence than as a regular practice. If Burns's back-up musicians feature the eminent likes of Sam Bush, Tim O'Brien and Scott Vestal, none of the 10 songs are borrowed from the bluegrass catalogue. Some of the strongest cuts are courtesy of folk-roots writers such as Guy Clark ("Magnolia Wind") and Steve Earle ("Nothing But a Child"). Mindy Smith's "Come to Jesus," not what the title sounds like, is unexpected and powerful.

Most affecting of all, however, is David Lynn Jones' "Living in the Promiseland," the final cut, evoking a time when America was proud to be a nation of immigrants. There can be no mistaking Burns' reason for reviving it. (Jones wrote and recorded it in the 1980s, if memory serves.) Today, sadly, I guess it takes someone who is not from here to remind us of the better country we used to be.