Based in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, onetime rock musician and now acoustic singer-songwriter Zachary Lucky releases Midwestern, his fifth album in a country-folk vein to be issued over the past 10 years. Hearing him for the first time, I can't help being reminded a little of another Saskatchewan artist, Colton Wall. Wall, who calls his approach "folk & western," is a master balladeer of Canada's prairie provinces. Lucky is pretty good at the same, in other words painting isolated landscapes and their hardscrabble inhabitants.

Lucky is the grandson of Smiling Johnnie Lucky, a regionally known country performer who plied a circuit in significant portion consisting of Canada's northern regions. In Midwestern the songs are from the point of view of a lonesome traveler who strums simple, sometimes threadbare tunes, backed by a small, stark band, in a mostly melancholy or unsettled frame of mind. The vocal is the conversational lament of a modest, soft-spoken man, seated across the table in some small-town establishment as he remembers years and miles over a cup of coffee or a bottle of beer.

After an initial impression that not much is happening here, you suddenly wise up. Before you know it, images waft vividly inside your head, and Lucky becomes compelling company. You're adrift with him down rural highways, alongside desolate farms and fields, sharing memories of places that barely anybody who hasn't lived there knows of. You go back there every time you play the album, and it haunts you.

Nick Nace left his native Ontario in the late 1990s to move to New York City, where he intended to follow an acting career. In time he got caught up in music instead. In 2015 he settled in East Nashville, joining a community of seriously intentioned singer-songwriters who practice their craft largely apart from the better-known Music City that flourishes west of the Cumberland River. Wrestling With the Mystery is his first full-length solo album.

There isn't much if anything that feels specifically Canadian about this recording. A country band backs Nace's neo-folkish writing and smooth yet faintly grizzled voice, a tad reminiscent of John Prine if Prine were a rather less ragged singer. Here and there, for instance on "White Trash Southern Belle," you might swear you're hearing Arlo Guthrie or maybe the late 1970s star Jim Croce. The songs are for grown-ups who appreciate unworn sentiments and a clear eye for the human condition.

While there isn't a great deal you haven't encountered if your ear is seasoned enough, it is still consistently rewarding. An eloquent yarn-spinner, Nace communicates a friendly, empathetic persona that elevates him to a position above the usual run of singer-songwriters. Too bad this isn't the sort of thing that plays on country radio, which I guess wouldn't know how to handle the likes of "Clarksdale Katie." A striking story (the title quotes from it), it's surely as strong as anything here, and sufficiently unusual that it has to be true, as Nace says it is.

Wrestling's final cut appends the traditional "Crawdad Hole" to the gloomy "Grandpa's Old Guitar." It affirms Nace's welcome grounding in real folk songs, not just in the concoctions of self-obsessed other singer-songwriters.