On The Man with Everything Nashville troubadour Matt Campbell is infused with some recognizable and blessed influences: Woody Guthrie, Hank Williams, John Prine and -- of course -- Bob Dylan. (The one non-original is Dylan's "Simple Twist of Fate," to which as it happens I've been listening in the newly issued alternative version on More Blood, More Tracks: The Bootleg Series Vol. 14.) Beyond specific artists Campbell slides into a dreamy ("Twice As Big") or loping ("That's the Way," "Back in the Country") Western swing.

In common with so much good music, his album is patched together from found materials. For me it highlights why I am attracted to certain genres. They connect me to strains of melody, memory and meaning that span my whole life, back to when I was hearing Hank on the radio while too young to have any idea who he was, only that he stood out from the competition. Campbell, though, lacks Hank's alcoholic gloom and, moreover, apparently gets along with his wife (or so I assume Mary Campbell is), to whom the recording is dedicated. Actually, Campbell and his music seem to arrive demon-free.

The first cut, "The Night That I Found Jesus," is a Prine-esque tall tale which begins, amusingly, with a parody of the opening lines of Woody's "Pretty Boy Floyd." "Christmas in Nashville" bespeaks Campbell's humor and his mastery of pregnant pause: What a beautiful sight/ Workin' tonight/ At Christmas in Nashville ... Indiana." (Yes, there is such a place.) Overall, this could pass as a lighter-hearted number on Prine's long-ago second album (Diamonds in the Rough, 1972). No one will hold this against Campbell. Anyway, not me; I've given Man with Everything half a dozen or more spins, and it continues to warm my heart.

Sometimes, hearing a particular performer, I find myself reflecting casually -- perhaps you do, too -- that this guy must be fun to hang out with. Campbell is one of those guys.

Then again, I don't know that about JP Harris. On the dark -- as in color and mood -- cover of Sometimes Dogs Bark at Nothing he looms shirtless at the forefront of a nocturnal landscape, a beard flowing nearly to his chest, tattoos covering just about every inch of exposed flesh, basically why I try to stay out of biker bars. In the largely confessional original songs Harris lets us know that after a series of self-inflicted excesses that messed him up badly, these days he spends his nights at home, except of course when he's on the road playing his music.

That music is modern honkytonk. By "modern" I don't mean watered down and cleaned up, the usual definition when that adjective rolls off the tongue. These are rough songs about rough living, set in various arrangements, acoustic and electric, which bandmates had a hand in shaping and which producer/Old Crow Medicine Crow member Morgan Jahnig oversaw. The consequences are country music of extraordinary power and intelligence, based on, yet oddly not quite like, familiar models. Harris honors the genre on one side while transcending it on the other.

Prior to the new release, he cut a couple of well-reviewed discs for the defunct Cow Island label (see my own reviews in this space on 4 August 2012 and 11 October 2014). Even then it looked as if he could achieve more than ordinary distinction if he kept at it. Well, he's kept at it, surviving something like a spiritual near-death experience to return with, for example, the parable "Jimmy's Dead & Gone." Documenting that Harris knows wherefrom he comes, the song references a range of hobo-ballad poets from Haywire Mac to Billy Joe Shaver. And also Jimmie Rodgers whose first name, cited in the title, he apparently hasn't learned how to spell. Still, a damn good song.

He offers up "Lady in the Spotlight," about the sexual exploitation of young women in the business, not a subject you're going to hear about in whitewashed mainstream country. At the same time "Runaway" (rambling), "When I Quit Drinking" (alcoholism) and the title song (obnoxious male behavior) address recognizable subjects while adroitly sidestepping ordinarily accompanying cliches. If you listen closely enough, you'll catch what feel like nods to Waylon Jennings, Chuck Berry and Mickey Newbury. "Long Ways Back," on the other hand, appears less modest about its genesis. It could easily be the result of a collaboration, admittedly unlikely, between Kris Kristofferson and Don Gibson.

The New Orleans-based Jon Hatchett Band trafficks in something its leader and songwriter calls "spiderbilly," a term that makes sense once you hear the music, which sounds ... er, multi-legged. Actually, it's a rocked-up country with a lyric sensibility shared in at least a broad way, perhaps, with Loudon Wainwright III, Michael Hurley and other avengers of the cosmos.

"You can't regret what you don't remember," Hatchett sings on Mother Nature Wins Again, and that sort of encapsulates his approach. You have to be reminded of what you did yesterday, and then you have to extract its grander existential significance, with abundant employment of imagination, from the void.

However one hears it, it sure is fun, if not without an underlying seriousness however odd the voice and absurd the vision. Sui generis, as the hillbillies like to say. I know it isn't -- can't be -- literally true, but at moments you get the impression that once you've entered Hatchett World, you're going to find just about anything you're looking for, along with some things whose existence you never dreamed of.