I suppose you could call Joe Troop a Pete Seeger for the 21st century. A radical-activist folk singer who claims banjo as his principal instrument, he writes topical (and other) songs on templates of American and international traditional music. Even Troop's website mentions Seeger as a prominent, or maybe simply an obvious, inspiration.

Still, Seeger's approach was rooted in a long-gone era of the Popular Front, progressivism and leftwing unions associated with the CIO (before it merged with its rival, more conservative AFL). Now preserved in a mass of reissues, the folk-derived songs from those days, however well meaning, sometimes feel clunky and didactic, evoking "the people" with all the fidelity to lived experience that the dopey fiction of Stalinist socialist realism has to offer. The clear-eyed view tells this much: that while Seeger was responsible for some of the most powerful protest songs ever penned, he also dumped a whole lot of forgettable drivel on the world.

Broadly speaking, Troop's songs are intended for a longer, sturdier hold on thought and imagination. In common with Seeger, Troop draws from an assortment of styles but with perhaps a deeper command of them. It doesn't hurt that the musical guests include such worthy figures in the current scene as Abigail Washburn, Tim O'Brien and Bela Fleck. Also, that there are some pretty funny songs, too. "Red, White & Blues" is a comic marvel.

It's something of a shock to hear what Troop does with an approach to topical songwriting that owes practically nothing to Dylan's 1960s revisionist assault on the genre. I guess it shows that you can be sincere without coming across as cloyingly earnest or irritatingly self-righteous. Trafficking in the familiar but in a novel vocabulary, Borrowed Time underscores the eternal newness, always there waiting to be retrieved, of old folk music.

Though this is Troop's first solo album, it doesn't arrive out of nowhere. His previous project was Che Apalache, a modernist sort-of bluegrass band that garnered a lot of attention and won some awards. For reasons unclear to me in retrospect, I didn't connect with the recording, issued in 2019. Toward the top of my to-do list, I plan to return to the disc and assess where we failed to communicate.

The eponymously titled RanchWriters is the creation of veteran Canadian musicians Barney Bentall and Geoffrey Kelly. I guess you might think of it as an instrumental celebration of the Western landscape that comprises British Columbia's Cariboo Country, a sprawling region of grasslands, mountains and rivers, site of ranches both working and tourist, as well as of small cities and towns.

You might also think of this album as what used to be called new age. "New age" was usually meant as a putdown, associated with instrumental sounds evoking atmosphere more than emotion. Understandably, Bentall and Kelly don't embrace the label. They prefer "cinematic," which is fair enough. It is cinematic. If you've seen enough Western movies, you can even conjure up the scene for which a tune would nicely fill the soundtrack, for example the one where the couple are falling in love as together they explore a pastoral setting in which the gunfire is momentarily stilled. When I was a little kid, we had a name for that: the mushy part.

To be fair, most titles denote landmarks or natural phenomena. Not "Fred Neil," though. That one is a tribute to a giant of the mid-century folk revival, composer of "Everybody's Talkin'," "The Other Side of This Life," "The Dolphins" and "Candy Man" (the Roy Orbison version). The Neil allusions, I must say, are notably subtle. I didn't catch them until I noticed the title and went looking.

I'm surprised, however, by how much I've enjoyed this album and how often it's been on the playing machine since it showed up in the mail not long ago. It succeeds with a hard-to-deny grace and musicality, even while delivering melodies that, if pleasing, are un-hummable. My knowledge of the technical aspects of music-making is a non-player's (i.e., slight), but I do recognize the elementary facts that one guitar is in standard tuning, the other in open, and they're both being finger-picked interestingly. Other players import other instruments into the mix, to the degree that the results could have been lush rather than -- as they are -- mostly contained and appealingly understated.

Bentall and Kelly use folkish music to curious effect. In fact, the pieces feel something like the ghosts of folk songs, maybe what they were when the melody was a dreamy abstraction, not a formed message. Or, in a possibly more charitable way of putting it, they're offering a way to imagine an interaction between performer and listener wherein the sound is at once distant and inviting, demanding our participation in order to capture its meaning.

After a couple of spins, you may stumble into the truth behind the joke: it's actually better than it sounds. Once the shock of that has worn off, you may decide, in fact, that it's even a whole lot better.

[ visit the RanchWriters' website ]

[ visit Joe Troop online ]