A dark, cold Northern late-December afternoon, the distressing news of the death of a musical hero, Alberta's Ian Tyson, crashing inside my skull, the voice of another Canadian folksinger-songwriter, James Keelaghan, wafts through the speakers. All these things confront and reinforce one another as if destined to fashion and underscore a mood. They don't cheer you up.

Keelaghan, who lives with his family in a small town in eastern Ontario, is an old-school sort of singer-songwriter. His vocal style is imposing but never bombastic. His melodies may feel like echoes of old Irish ballads and North American hymns, but even when the lyrics are about something that happened decades ago, he delivers them persuasively, as if present in the moment.

On the newly released Second-Hand there are seven originals (some of them co-writes) and two covers (including the late Jesse Winchester's "Eulalie," with the flavor of a 19th-century parlor song; it's a winning choice). Mostly, the songs call up sorrow, isolation, lamented fate and even the occasional murder. I can understand why Keelaghan doesn't want every number to speak of the above, but there can be no doubt that he has a particular flair for the darker musical colors. Indeed, they're at the root of his appeal.

Curiously, on this day on which a towering Canadian folk figure has passed, Keelaghan offers "Alberta," which relates the same story Tyson's "Four Strong Winds" tells, about a relationship that falters somewhere between remote rural Alberta and a livelier urban landscape. Though the theme is implied in the earlier song, Keelaghan's version more explicitly identifies this Western prairie province as the third party in the break-up. As such, while "Alberta" probably isn't destined for the immortality "Winds" has achieved, it is still a moving, deeply considered creation whose power seems to expand with each successive listening.

Comfortable with the approach he's continued to shape all these years, Keelaghan's sobriety and intensity, carried by acoustic, folk-based melodies that occasionally are hard for a listener to shake out of repeat performances on the psychic soundstage, manage to tangle the comforts of the brightly familiar and the discomforts of the places ill-lit. The finest lead us through darkness without slipping once into sentimentality or, worse, exhibitionism. On this sad December day Keelaghan offers up chilly scenes of winter, beautifully.

[ visit James Keelaghan's website ]