James Hyland was just a name to me till Western showed up one day in the mail. The first thing that caught my attention was its length: 80 minutes. That's as much content as you can squeeze onto a compact disc. Ordinarily, that'll get you a retrospective anthology of decades-old hillbilly, blues, ethnic or jazz recordings, all public domain so that no royalties need be expended.

But this isn't that. It consists of 19 cuts' worth of songs composed by Austin singer-songwriter Hyland. One immediately presumes that the man is stretching himself perilously thin, that there will be, in an optimistic assessment, a handful of decent songs and a whole lot of filler. That complacent guess is falsified one hour and 20 minutes later, after which the listener is forced to embrace the disconcerting fact that there are no filler songs; Western maintains consistent quality from the first cut, "The Edge of Comancheria," to the last, "Full Moon." Even more remarkably, each song has its own musical personality. In other words, the melodies don't blur into each other.

I don't know if Hyland is astonishingly prolific or if he's been saving these up over time for a single album. His website informs me that he is a particularly active musician, not only a solo act but a member of a bluegrass band and a jug band. Again, I learn that my conviction that I know of everyone of consequence on the roots scene is delusional.

Western is largely as advertised, not quite a themed album or song cycle but close enough. The bulk of it is focused on Texas, especially -- albeit not exclusively -- on its 19th-century frontier. That's the subject of "First Westbound Train," "Texas Ranger," "Top Floor," the above-mentioned "Comancheria," "You've Come to the Right Place" and others. The songs draw in good part on folk-ballad traditions, spiced with elements of rock and country; in other words, here and there they encourage thoughts of Steve Earle. Not a complaint, just shorthand for a way of fusing older and newer musical ideas.

Typically, Hyland conjures up characters who tell their stories in the first person. One, on "Top Floor," is a piano player who sings "Oh Susannah!" and "Pretty Peggy-O" in a cowboy bar and whorehouse. Another, set in our time, is a small-time crook and all-around pest, the star of "The Ballad of Eddie Mullet," which is a very funny meditation on crime, family and hair. "Today's a Good Day to Die" is from the point of view of a Sioux warrior busily slaughtering Custer's troops in 1876 Montana. Placed in Tennessee in 1881 to an oldtime stringband setting, "Ramblin' Man" affectingly imagines the thoughts of a doomed fugitive.

I sometimes hear recordings by well-meaning performers who have tried but failed to make this sort of historical approach work. Hyland is not among them. Western is the surprisingly successful statement of an exceptionally talented -- and one might add intelligent -- artist. I hope he will be more than an Austin secret the next time I write about him.