If the title of this engaging CD has any deeper meaning, it may allude to the way Johnny Nicholas usually gets pigeon-holed as a blues musician. Not that there's anything wrong with being a blues musician, obviously. Still, if you listen to this Austin-based singer-songwriter-guitarist (whose previous releases I reviewed here on 22 October 2016 and 13 January 2018), you discern other roots influences not ordinarily encountered in your typical white blues revivalist, for example country, folk, Tex-Mex and jazz. He brings a unique perspective to all of these genres. You may know where he's coming from, but he doesn't sound like anybody in particular you can immediately, er, identify. Well, maybe except for "Guadalupe's Prayer," which with a bit of stretched imagination you could hear Townes Van Zandt crooning.

In Mistaken Identity and elsewhere Nicholas defies expectations, while never pushing a song harder than it needs to be, marking his own territory while sounding neither particularly radical nor especially experimental, yet certainly not stale either. The reason, I suppose, is that he is so intimately immersed in the older varieties of music that they have become his own and come out of his mouth only in his own voice. A mature and confident artist who isn't trying to be anybody other than who he is, he doesn't try to bowl you over. His approach amounts to an intelligent reordering of the familiar.

The title song, a laconic tale narrated against a piano-r&b background, concerns romantic mischance and may not carry any heavier weight than that. The blandly titled "Wanna Be Your Baby" turns out to be more interesting than it sounds, which proves to be a kind of noirish neo-rockabilly whose atmospherics transcend their unexceptional lyrics. Another rockabilly tune, "Tight Pants," follows, a good-natured horndog yowl like they used to back in the 1950s when rock 'n' roll was scaring hell out of grown-ups (or, as Mad called them, "groan-ups").

To my ears the most thematically stirring cut, alongside the concluding "River Runs Deep" written by the late Stephen Bruton, is "She Didn't Think of Me That Way," about a situation nobody who's been there will fail to recognize. An ear-gratifying country-folk melody carries it, and Josh Baca's gentle conjunto accordion sound takes it to a level where only the most noble disconsolate hearts wander. Nicholas sure does sound bummed out, though. Don't listen to it if the unfortunate experience he's reciting isn't a safely distant memory.

There is a curious sort of organic quality to Mistaken Identity. The late Mississippi Fred McDowell used to call his brand of deep rural blues "straight 'n' natural." This isn't deep rural blues, but it's a true sound, and it's kind to your soul.