At age 72 Jim Wyly has released his first solo album. Though such late-life flowering rarely happens, it is not unheard of. What's less predictable is how well The Artisan sounds. Wyly's sometimes haunted voice is gripping and affecting in all the bleaker moments -- in other words those that conjure up episodes of existential crisis. The skeletal production puts the vocal where it belongs: right up front.

A Texas-based singer-songwriter, Wyly records in the company of four musicians, including familiar Austin names Ray Bonneville (harmonica) and Libby Koch (harmony). Along with Javier Chaparro (fiddle) and Jorge de Armas (percussion), he accompanies himself on acoustic guitar and sounds generally like a creature of the Woody Guthrie lineage, albeit without the politics. I don't use "creature" loosely, by the way. Two of the album's most unusual songs concern cryptozoological animals, often featured on cable television or between book covers but rarely celebrated in song ("Wildman of the Thicket," "Please Nessie").

"Coyotes of Legend," about consensus-reality animals yet associated with supernatural lore, is a stunner. Fused with beauty and sorrow, it expresses the sort of perspective one might hear from Tom Russell or Ian Tyson, concerning the wrenching relationship of wildlife and Homo sapiens. In a coyote's voice Wyly explains the animal's continued existence:"We survive the human tide/Matching teeth and grit." I am reminded of an experience one summer afternoon as I drove near the South Dakota border, when a coyote darted in front of my car and startled me. I had never seen such a vision of wildness.

Listening to "Red Water River Queen" for the first time, I expected something in the vein of John Fogerty's onetime radio/bar-band staple "Proud Mary," which celebrates a river boat. It turned out to be about a river boat, all right, but no celebration. Its subject is a predatory floating casino in modern-day Texas. One appreciates and admires Wyly's talent for defying listeners' anticipations and taking them elsewhere. Sadly, that talent at times abandons him.

Let me be stress that Wyly, as already noted, is a powerful singer and a fashioner of hard-hitting melodies. That said, while decently performed, numbers such as "Suddenly I'm Single" and "Someone's Gonna Love You" are not notably different from a flood of other treatments of romantic angst. If those sentiments, which are real enough and which few pass through life without experiencing, are to be transformed into revelation, they ought to be put into a larger, more imaginative context (say, experiential or geographical). Wyly's fellow folk-influenced songwriters long ago figured out that one; traditional music did a pretty good job, too. Which is to say confessional songs would do well to rise above the merely maudlin. If they are to engage our interest, they should be about other things, too.

I lay down these observations reluctantly because I like Wyly and The Artisan. The songs that strike me as most successful are better than most I hear in an age when more songs are being written than the traffic can bear or than deserve to be there. I count "Coyotes of Legend" among the finest newly minted songs I've heard in 2018, and some of the others are not far behind. They're worth the time and the purchase of the album.