Like the songwriters to whom he's most often compared – John Prine, Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan – Bill Morrissey can insinuate volumes with a taut couplet or skeletal image. And if – as Prine has said – songwriting is about "a blank piece of paper and leaving out what's not supposed to be there," then Night Train punches Morrissey's ticket to ride on the same well-traveled rails as those celebrated singer-poets.

Morrissey's songs capture the stark, hardscrabble milieus of a subterranean New England culture – rootless drifters, despondent cabbies, beery, down-on-their-luck deckhands. On Night Train, lovers meet by the highway sign, scarecrows hide behind rows of corn, and ghosts scream in the wind. But, as with his 1992 release Inside, Morrissey also details domestic dramas, midlife compromises, spiritual conflict and the perils of emotional entanglement. In the spare "Birches," a woman sits alone by a fire while her mate slumbers upstairs and yearns to rekindle flames of passion that have long since cooled: "And she knew the fire would start to fade/She thought of heat, she thought of time/And she called it an even trade."

But Morrissey balances his middle-age elegies with moments of goofy, post-40 bliss, as on "Ellen's Tune." While Johnny Cunningham coaxes a supple melody from his violin, Morrissey croaks: "I drink for ballast/I sing for fun/I love my baby/When her hair's undone." On several tracks, Morrissey's acoustic-based, country-and-blues-laced musings are elegantly framed by bass and drums – and by guitarist Duke Levine's evocative Celtic drone and twangy, Memphis-style reverb.

On Friend of Mine, Morrissey hooks up with a kindred spirit – his gravel-voiced fishing buddy Greg Brown. Friend is an example of prolific songwriters replenishing the muse by digging deep into the folk, blues, roots-rock and country-music archives. Morrissey's and Brown's weather-beaten baritones and homespun but highway-hardened deliveries – rendered in loose-limbed acoustic settings – reclaim the songs of Hank Williams, Willie Dixon, Chuck Berry and Jagger-Richards, among others.

Brown's world-weary phrasing recasts the Stones' "You Can't Always Get What You Want" as a wizened admonitory tale, while Morrissey's hesitant delivery imbues Danny O'Keefe's "The Road" with poignancy and resignation. Berry's "Memphis, Tennessee" is a shambling romp, and on "Baby, Please Don't Go," Morrissey's and Brown's gruffly insistent vocals pack a world of passion and urgency into two minutes.

If Night Train fixes Morrissey's star in the folk firmament, Friend of Mine channels the restless mojo of his and Brown's spiritual forebears. But whether he's trolling the waters of history to find new truths in old songs or restocking the trad-music pond with his own incisive tunes, Morrissey is new folk's most distinctive voice – creaky and bruised, but standing tall. (RS 669)

KEVIN RANSOM