There will come a day, all my instincts psychic and other tell me, that a review of a Teddy Thompson album foregoes mentioning that he is the son of Richard & Linda Thompson who (long-divorced) were -- all together now -- "folk-rock royalty." This is not that review.

Unlike his parents, Teddy does not count among his influences the English folksong tradition. As I learn from listening to this, not his first but the first I've heard, he certainly isn't a folk singer, and he isn't really a rocker either. Heartbreaker Please, consisting of 10 originals, is pop, though not of a generic strain, by which I mean the kind you're likely to be subjected to while you're browsing the produce section of the supermarket. You can trace this sort of thing to dimly recalled 1960s and '70s male vocalists who usually seemed out of sorts as they crooned romantic ballads of love gained or lost, predominately the latter. Some of them were good at it. I still listen on occasion to the often-celebrated Roy Orbison and to the far less-famous Jesse Winchester.

Heartbreaker Please is an undeniably enjoyable recording. In other words, Thompson's genes don't fail him. Evidently, he was born to sing and write songs that engage the listener with deceptive ease. The melodies are uniformly strong, the arrangements intelligently conceived, never overbearing. What more do you want? The music is neither profound nor stupid, simply comfortable at calling up experiences we all recognize alongside the associated emotions.

Besides, as a fellow admirer who shares his love for it, I appreciate his tribute to a soon-to-be-extinct part of our lives in "Record Player."

Steve Forbert's debut album appeared in 1978, when it was still permissible to call somebody a "new Dylan" and not get laughed out the door even if you deserved to be. It was designated, practically shouted, Alive on Arrival, and he sure was, with stripped-down arrangements and 10 fabulous self-penned songs (15 on the 2013 reissue) performed for the ages. Even now it thrills me when I put in the, uh, record player. The more fully produced, rock-oriented Jackrabbit Slim followed, producing the number-one hit "Romeo's Tune."

That comprised his moment in the spotlight. Since then he's become one of the army of cult artists furtively roaming the landscape (in common, by the way, with Teddy and his dad) and quietly recording one exceptional album after another. His The Magic Tree (2018) is a particular marvel, in my judgment. One verse in it (from "Carolina Blue Sky Blues") may serve as something like a statement of Forbert's songwriting philosophy: Mom says things aren't what they seem/ I say she lives in a dream/ Things are what they seem to be.

Consequently, Forbert's songs are disarmingly straightforward. There is nothing secretive about them. One need not bother pondering hidden meanings. He says what's on his mind in a conversational sort of way, and we listen with interest as if to a friend. We presume that the "I" in them is Forbert himself. In many other songwriters that's annoying; it's derided, more often than not with justification, as navel gazing. Not here. In his songs he is egoless, an Everyman who lives an ordinary existence except for the fact that he gets to write songs and perform them in venues all across the land, the subject by the way of Tree's excellent, almost Guthrie-esque "Movin' Around America."

Besides being straightforward, the songs attest to an ethic of solid craftsmanship. They never sound tossed-off, and they are cliche-free even when the subjects are quotidian ones in which a lazier writer would draw on the standard tropes. Forbert numbers don't sound like anybody else's. Nor does he sing them like anybody else. His distinctive young man's vocal chords from his early albums have not atrophied in the decades since; they've just grown darker and deeper.

I don't know how much Forbert cares about traditional music. From the recorded evidence, we know only that he's conversant in Jimmie Rodgers and Robert Johnson. But his style is an evolutionary adaptation from Woody Guthrie and his acolytes, Dylan of course but also Fred Neil, Tom Paxton, Ian Tyson and other composers who showed the way to a new kind of songwriting, inspired by vernacular models and removed from the strictures of pure pop. On that template Forbert creates a music very much its own self, with its own unique melodies and lyric sensibility.

On Early Morning Rain -- the name, incidentally, of a 1965 Ian & Sylvia album -- Forbert offers a selection of covers, together -- so one infers -- only because they're songs he likes. The title (and opening cut) is Gordon Lightfoot's early masterpiece, feeling as fresh in Lightfoot's masterly creation and in Forbert's recreation as a few hours ago. Of the songs that don't wear out their welcome, this is indeed one.

Most other choices are of a folkish nature (the two exceptions being an Elton John hit and a Ray Davies deep cut), and most or all will be known to those of us who nest in that particular branch of the tree. A big surprise is Richard Thompson's "Withered & Died," among his most enduring compositions; it's hard to anticipate that so American a musical personality would take on something that could pass for an old English folk song. Still, it doesn't shock that Forbert pulls it off.

Unexpectedly, Phil Lesh and Robert Hunter's seldom-covered "Box of Rain," from the Grateful Dead's beloved 1970 release American Beauty, shows up when "Ripple" (Hunter with Jerry Garcia) is the usual choice of musicians looking for a song to do from that source. Though manifestly about the formation of the band, Forbert happily adapts it to his own purposes. The last two lines are stolen from a venerable Appalachian song known to Dead lyricist Robert Hunter, who sprinkled his writing with allusions to (in Mike Seeger's phrase) the Old Southern Sound or (in Greil Marcus's) the Old, Weird America.

Forbert may be many things, but the adjective "mysterious" would never find itself attached to any of his compositions known to me. On the other hand, "mysterious" easily falls upon Leonard Cohen's epic of sex and Jesus and oranges, "Suzanne." While hardly a reinvention, this version is amazingly lovely, as good as any since Cohen's on his first Columbia album in 1967. I think that's because the latter's industrial drone contributed to the power of the original, while Forbert's yearningly expressive voice does the same from an opposite direction.

If Early Morning Rain represents Forbert's desire to try something different, it also reminds us what an able, likable singer he is. Whether the songs are known to you or not, Steve Forbert manages to enhance them.