On his two-disc, 26-cut set Nashville singer-songwriter Rod Picott features material he has written over the decades with a near-lifelong friend, Austin singer-songwriter Slaid Cleaves. Both grew up in small-town Maine, and the same one for a while. The songs are slow to mid-tempo, with skeletal acoustic production undergirding a noirish folk tone. Bruce Springsteen is an audible presence, and not just in "The Ballad of the Magic Rats," named after a character in a Springsteen tune.

Wood, Street, Dust & Dreams has the sound and feeling of Nebraska, Springsteen's much-celebrated 1982 release. (Rereading my review of Picott's previous album in this space on 22 June 2019, I see I made the identical point.) The characters, even in the songs that appear to be at least partially autobiographical, tend to be down-on-their-luck working stiffs.

The one song I've heard before is "Broke Down," a well-crafted composition of whose existence it is a pleasure to be reminded. I learn in the accompanying liner booklet that Picott wrote the original draft before handing it over to Cleaves for revision.The song was a standard (in Cleaves' version) for years on FM stations whose format highlighted acoustic singer-songwriters.

Picott's strength is a natural storytelling talent giving voice to believable individuals who face quotidian varieties of desperate circumstances. Even when the character is himself, he feels bigger, paradoxically because the smallness of the lives he evokes conveys a sense of the larger humanity that defines us all. The melodies are plain -- sometimes, perhaps, to the point of monotony -- but they have a way of transforming into a kind of makeup-less beauty. That may be because they are perfectly suited to the stories they help to tell.

More than most who string tales to unadorned tunes, Picott succeeds as both an old-fashioned balladeer and a modern-day short-story writer.

The character who narrates Friends in High Places is living, like Picott's people, a lowly, modest existence but hardly by choice. You can feel sorry for him if you wish. He comes across as flawed but hardly evil; yet he is something of a hustler. He is unabashedly out for earthly reward: fame, money, women. It doesn't matter if this is or is not self-referencing, I suppose. But if I were to presume it were for the sake of the rest of this sentence, I'd guess that it's the testimony of a songwriter who attracted early recognition that took him to Hollywood (real or metaphorical) before all went south and the struggles of ordinary life resumed, only this time under a layer of regrets (for the last, see "Nothing But Regrets").

I hope I'm not stepping on anybody's feelings when I remark that "Turner Cody" sounds less like a real name than one attached to a character in a Western movie I might have seen when I was a kid. I suppose somebody could possess that name, even somebody who lives in Queens and who cut these 11 sides in Brussels on a Belgian label. By the way, one number, "Mr. Wrong," is as peculiar a Western-outlaw ballad as I've heard. On the other hand, maybe it's really about another kind of Western bad man: the Hollywood weasel.

When I first put Friends on the player and proceeded to hear the opener, "Boozing and Losing," I wasn't even positive that what I was hearing was singing. It sounded at first blush like some kind of precious recitation, the testimony of an imaginary being such as a world-weary naif. I probably would have terminated exposure on the spot if it hadn't sounded so weird that I was caught in a kind of hypnotized paralysis. Next thing I knew, all 37 minutes' worth of album had passed me by, leaving in their wake confusion and even a degree of panic at my inability to stay on top of what had just occurred. I understood only that I had never heard anything quite like this before. Or if I had, I hadn't wanted to hear it and had made sure to forget it. So I played the disc again, and then again after that, and once more. I never do that. (Well, okay, once with a Carter Family record.)

Cody is indeed singing, just like hardly anybody else. When you accept it for what it is, you hear the underlying charm and the left-of-center charisma. To recall an artist whose singing Cody's brings to mind, I had to turn back the decades to junior high school, when a friend owned a Ricky Nelson album we often listened to. As I attempt to resurrect those prehistoric memories, I remember a modest voice carrying not entirely formed but uncannily affecting melodies, their words laid bare as if in confession.

The Soldiers of Love are a small Belgian ensemble setting the songs in elemental country-folk arrangements. The "country" refers to some of the instrumental sounds; otherwise, this is not country music of any sort. Occasional references in the lyrics, such as to "the roving gambler" and in the title "Love in Vain," heretofore associated with Robert Johnson, reveal where Cody comes from (classic folk and blues), however confoundingly. Aside from that, other than a reference to "good songs in the fingering of G/ With a note of Stephen Foster and a coat of R.E. Lee," he betrays no particular compulsion to explain himself and his curious approach to song-making.

I keep listening, after starting unpromisingly with -- direct quote -- what is this shit? This was after two or three minutes' listening. After two or three hours' worth I had started to wonder if I was hearing somebody whose only rivals are Bob Dylan and John Prine. By that time I feared Cody's music had driven me to madness. So I ceased listening for a few days, not resuming until I sat down to put this review together, at which point I fully expected to have the questions resolved.

Just who is Turner Cody, and how seriously should we take him?

I don't know. Turns out I'm still working on it.