North Carolina-born mandolinist Ashby Frank lives and works in Nashville, where he has been known largely as collaborator with the popular vocalist/instrumentalist Vince Gill, an occasional uncredited presence on Run This Town and a country star who has never entirely abandoned his roots in bluegrass. Frank often joins Gill and his band on the road.

Frank is an outstanding vocalist himself. He co-wrote the title song, highlighting his talents as a songwriter (in this instance with Jack McKeon). It's about dashed Music City dreams, a reality that has inspired a litany of bitter laments over the decades. This one is pretty damn good, though Dwayne Warwick may have composed the most eyebrow-raising anthem of any, "Sundown in Nashville," cut some years ago in an almost scary reading by Marty Stuart. It's as much a warning as a song.

Though inevitably some tracks will grip you more intensely than others, nearly every one will touch you in one way or another. That's unusual in my experience.

Bluegrass/bluegrass-adjacent material is usually hit and miss. As I've had occasion to gripe here in the past, too many tunes amount to little more than hackneyed themes thrown listlessly at fancily picked melodies. Barely saying anything worth hearing, the voices mouthing the stories play the role of just another instrument, and the least interesting.

This is certainly not the case here. Frank has an unusually keen ear for the material he chooses to record. Some of it (e.g., Kirk McGee's enduring "Blue Nights," the opener, which I take to be Frank's declaration that no matter where I go from now on, this is the place where I start from), is in a traditional vein inspired by Bill Monroe, and whom more fittingly?. He and his masterly band then draw songs from various strains, including English rocker Mark Knopfler's "The Bug," set in a bluegrass-adjacent arrangement that I'm sure its composer never imagined a remotely like iteration.

Then there's a close-to-the-original "Mr. Engineer," from Jimmy Martin, the man sometimes called the King of Bluegrass (as opposed to competitor Monroe's own honorific Father of Bluegrass). This one feels right out of Appalachia, akin to something that could have been of anonymous authorship and an authentic mountain song. "Everybody's Got Their Nine-Pound Hammer" alludes to the famous Kentucky mining anthem but transforms the hammer image into metaphor for the trials of modern life. It's a conceit only the smartest of our times' bluegrass writers could have conjured up, and Tim Stafford, Eric Gibson and Greg Cornett happen, not coincidentally, to be three of them.

This number is but one of the album's particular pleasures, which encompass the gorgeously melodic and memorably felt "She Believes" and "God Gave Me Horses." The joyful moments are not always quite bluegrass, at least by the strictest definition. Even so, one gains the impression that the left-of-center tunes and production models could preview a future mainstream bluegrass that focuses on melodicism and lyricism. You may well be catching it here first.