Rod Picott, a small-town Maine native and current Nashville resident, will remind you of a few other performers. It won't be because he's a conscious imitator, though it's clear he listens to them, but he is definitely putting his mark on a certain genre style. At least in my hearing, his immediate influences are Woody Guthrie, Leonard Cohen and Nebraska-era Bruce Springsteen (whose album was released four decades ago, if you can believe it). Each of those three passes through the singer-songwriter movement that came into shape during the 1960s folk revival.

Picott has picked up something of a Guthrie sensibility: his characters are down-on-their-luck souls on the margins of American life. Woody wrote some dark songs about tragedy and death on those margins, but more often a certain hopefulness underlay the narrative, occasionally grounded (if rarely explicitly stated) in the false god of Stalin's Soviet Union. Picott's politics are implicit, the causes of his characters' desperate circumstances left to listeners' imaginations, though it's not a large leap of same to land on the failures of American capitalism.

Cohen looms more as a vocal echo, a singer whose instrument is drenched in dread, an emotion omnipresent in Picott's delivery. While like Cohen a poet, Picott is one of plainer speech. Both draw on autobiographical elements (as one finds on acquaintance with either's early life), though their experiences were/are not much alike.

For all their darkness Springsteen's stories in Nebraska are narrated by working stiffs mostly attached to the middle class, if far from its upper rungs. One has the impression that Picott's are often struggling for their next meal. You might call them the lumpenproletariat, forgotten these days in the rhetoric of even the most progressive elected officials, who -- at least in their public pronouncements -- are uniquely focused on the well-being of the middle class. Whatever its grievances, the 21st-century iteration lives in a fundamentally sound economy. Some of Picott's, on the other hand, could be natives of a dysfunctional Third World state. Picott underscores the point with a concluding song titled "Time to Let Go of Your Dreams," no less.

Such people exist in conditions of lesser and lesser visibility amid coarsening, even cruel political discourse. (Let me stress I don't mean by that the vacuous "both sides do it" dodge.) Obviously, we don't spend our days in Woody's Dust Bowl. Still, hard times and injustice survive. From a musician/songwriter's narrow perspective, though, they're not easily addressed without the risk of broadcasting off-putting preachiness and self-righteousness.

Picott manages. The more I hear him -- and Starlight Tour (a song with a particularly disturbing tale to tell) -- the more that impresses me, the more his art takes on an austere, terrifying beauty. I said it last time I wrote about him here, and I'll say it again: I'd rather listen to Rod Picott's songs than to any Bob Dylan has written in years.