Just the other day, I found myself listening to the just-issued Seldom Scene album Changes. On their Rounder debut these venerable bluegrassers choose to celebrate the great folk-based songwriting of the mid-1960s to early '70s, visiting material by Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs, John Prine, Gordon Lightfoot, Fred Neil and others. I've known these songs from their inception, and it did not surprise me that they retain their old power.

Then I returned to current recordings, which I was preparing to review, by singer-songwriters Chuck Hawthorne and Rod Picott. If I hadn't already known it, I would have been schooled on how these guys learned to do what they do. If they were a generation or two older, Hawthorne and Picott would have fit in with that legendary crowd and likely would be remembered today. Of course, we don't have to "remember" them because they're here among us performing, releasing records and composing fresh songs (also, obviously, they sound the way they do because of an already set template; Dylan and his contemporaries had to make do from Woody Guthrie, Hank Williams, downhome blues and traditional ballads). As I have often remarked in this space, my enthusiasm for singer-songwriters runs short of limitless. One reason is that few match or even approach the miles-high standards set by the name-checked above.

This is, I read here, Picott's eleventh album. It's the first, however, to play within my listening space. I saw Picott do a short set on television some years ago and recall, though nothing else, liking what I heard. My first impression, and I suspect it will be yours too, is that Tell the Truth can be counted as Picott's Nebraska. As in the country of that classic 1982 Bruce Springsteen recording, the landscape is bleak, illuminated only by shades of darkness, and the sound is no more than strummed acoustic guitar and occasional harmonica squall, and the melodies are mid-tempo and minimal but suited to the occasion.

More than one cut conjures up suicide, and others explore other strains of imperiled mortality. Not to mention poverty, imprisonment and, of course, shattered love. Don't think you'll get relief, either, just because a song is titled "A Beautiful Light." In fact, Picott, who lives in Nashville, takes issue with politically reactionary country songs that "paint the hard life in a beautiful light." Beyond that, "Light" calls up desperate working stiffs who in a line at once witty and shocking "punch the clock/ But it hits back twice as hard/ ... A poor man's punch line to a rich man's joke."

I'm not sure I can explain this exactly, but ... around the time my copy of Tell the Truth & Shame the Devil showed up in the mail, for various reasons I happened to be wallowing in the Slough of Despond. It should have made me feel worse. Instead, against all reason and expectation, it made me feel better. I guess a good album will do that to you.

Okay, to be blunt and simple, Chuck Hawthorne's Fire Out of Stone (his second, I believe) is a hell of a record, by which I mean every one of its nine originals plus a closer by the late Richard Dobson. A uniquely expressive singer, Hawthorne has a gift for razor-sharp lyrics and stick-in-the-psychic-jukebox melodies. Sometimes even the most worthy albums take multiple spins to register in my ever-dimming comprehension. This one had me by the second cut ("Amarillo Wind"), and I defy you not to experience likewise.

That said, for all his outsized talent, Hawthorne is more audibly than most the sum of his influences, which admittedly are influences anybody with good taste would want to have. Had John Prine grown up in the Southwest (Hawthorne lives in Austin), one supposes he could have written "Amarillo Wind." One can also imagine that it would be a lasting fan favorite. The gripping "Arrowhead & Porcupine Claw" owes something to the late John Stewart's sensibility. In fact, "New Lost Generation," one of the strongest new songs I've heard so far this year, might have been a Prine/Stewart collaboration. There's even a near-quote from the former's "Speed of the Sound of Loneliness" as well as a nod to the latter's touching use of the moon landing as a metaphor for an America spiraling out of control.

Other apparent inspirations include Tom Russell, Ian Tyson and maybe others whose work I don't know. How much does this matter? In its understated way Fire is a perfect gleaming gem, song for song an album that is something not unlike a masterpiece. It is the kind of recording one is always seeking even if one ordinarily ends up settling for less. Anyway, everybody borrows from somebody, and that includes every famous musician, writer, or other creative human you can think of. Maybe it's just a question of borrowing from the right people.

Hawthorne, let me stress, brings much of himself to his art, prominently a singing style that will take possession of any attentive listener's ear and heart. Many singers I favor have, technically speaking, little more than adequate voices. Not only is Hawthorne's more than adequate, at moments it can be transcendent, seeming to erase the distance between art and artist. He uses his voice -- I mean this as a sincere compliment -- as an unusually gifted actor would. Put more formally, his vocal dynamics are outstanding. The man just plain knows how to sing.

And, to repeat myself, he knows how to write and how to absorb influences to maximum advantage. Let me put it this way: I didn't see this one coming. You won't either.