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...

On his seventh album, "you'll Never Get to Heaven," Bill Morrissey once again traces the lives of New England people who, to borrow Bruce Springsteen's description of the characters in Darkness on the Edge of Town, travel "from nowhere to nowhere." Restless, stuck or both, they take waitressing jobs or the next ride out of town when the mill closes. Their personal lives are no more stable –...

In remarkably compressed portraits, New England singer-songwriter Bill Morrissey melds the vaporish world of desire with the hard-edged world of daily life. A millworker dies in a fire soon after telling his friend, "What I want has drifted so far from what I now expect." A man despondent over his failed marriage watches a fight on TV, unable to muster much ardor for his lover. A lonely gas-statio...

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...