I am not happy that singer-songwriters have colonized so much of the space where my musical tastes lie. What once seemed like a fad long since became a permanent fixture of the landscape, a genre of its own which grew out of Bob Dylan and the 1960s folk revival but which now traces its influences -- elevated absurdly in the rhetoric of "Americana" boosters to "roots" -- to nothing deeper than other singer-songwriters. Even Dylan, responsible as much as anybody for this state of affairs, has complained.

Being known as a writer interested in folk and folk-based music, I am at the receiving end of review discs documenting singer-songwriters whose sole link to "folk" is that they play on and write to acoustic stringed instruments. Mostly, it is clear that Woody Guthrie is barely a name to them, much less someone from whom they might learn something. I have to keep reminding myself that nobody is obliged to write to please someone, namely me, who has a keen sense of the history of song, accompanied by a stubborn conviction that somebody's musical creations are going to sound better and smarter if they are informed by that history. I am not a musician, but I have worked most of my adult life as a writer, and I know I could not write well if I did not read widely.

I suppose this is another way of saying that at this stage of my life I am largely out of sympathy with pop music, which requires little more to justify itself than immediate appeal and the promise of financial reward. So it sometimes bewilders me that overwhelmingly, singer-songwriters do what they do, beyond a desire to express themselves; what they're doing, most of them anyway, is popular music without the accompanying cash. In other words, even one as inclined to skepticism in these matters as I am can see some nobility in it. The pleasure in the hearing of it is another issue.

That said, to my surprise I have rather enjoyed Davis Kathriner's Losing Habits, oddly touching in its melancholy, sepia tone, and uncluttered, largely acoustic production. That it succeeds owes to the talents of the two middle-aged men, Ben Davis (who also produces) and Danny Kathriner, who co-wrote 11 of the dozen songs; Laura Cantrell adds her byline (and voice) to theirs on "Breakfast Table." Drawing on literary and cinematic influences, Davis Kathriner sings, I guess you'd say, of Life, specifically of Life as experienced midway through it. This could have been terrible.

It isn't, though. The perspective is mature and unsentimental, recognizable to those of us who at a certain age are consumed more by memories and reflections than by hopes and expectations. There is a point at which you're trying to sort out all those events and experiences that have taken you to where you are, even as one's past recedes into distance and mystery. Losing Habits feels like that. I doubt, frankly, that a young listener will be able to make much sense of it. The tunes and musical settings, neither quite rock nor quite folk, certainly not conventional pop, evoke nothing so much as Lincoln's famous phrase "the mystic chords of memory."

Benjamin Jason Douglas comes out of another spot on the spectrum. First World Blues is growling and irreverent in its liveliest moments, informed by blues, folk and gospel. Also -- it's hard not to deduce -- most of all by Tom Waits. If Davis Kathriner is gazing at the twilight, Douglas's illumination flashes from neon lights, and his songs, including the ones with morning-after regrets, sound as if lit up by alcohol-laden liquids.

Not that there's no sobriety in these grooves. The bitter "Walkin' Down the Grain" deals in loss and death and greets them with a torrent of fiery fatalism. The oddly titled "Diggin' & Stigmata," a bluesy rocker, is something of an old-fashioned Dylanesque rant aimed at somebody who's too big for his britches, though Douglas's habit of swallowing some of his words makes that interpretation only a half-confident guess.

I confess that after several listenings I'm not entirely sure what Douglas is up to. I think just about every listener will agree that "Tchoupitoulas" (a street in New Orleans) is an immediate charmer, the one song likely to keep spinning in the psychic jukebox. The closer, "Gloria," casts an eerie, atmospheric spell. Otherwise, First World Blues remains frustratingly elusive, sometimes intriguing, but difficult to untangle, and -- at least for this reviewer -- defying certainty about whether this quality amounts to fault or virtue or merely quirk.