My Favorite Picture of You

At its best, country & western music tells honest tales with pretty tunes, and that’s what 72-year-old songwriter Guy Clark mostly accomplishes with his first studio album in four years. It’s also his first since the death of his wife, songwriter Susanna Clark, last year and his musical memorial to her – the title-track – features Guy sounding honest and homespun on lead vocals and acoustic guitar. The title refers to the Polaroid photo on the album’s cover, taken by John Lomax III in the 70s, depicting Susanna’s angry reaction to finding her husband and the late country songwriter Townes Van Zandt overindulging in drink.

Clark’s other songs here are similarly evocative. There’s the lonely woman of ‘Rain in Durango’ and the doomed itinerant musician of ‘Death of Sis Draper’ (which quotes from the 18th-century folk song ‘Shady Grove’). The perils of human trafficking across the Mexico-US border are addressed on ‘El Coyote’, which deploys Tex-Mex guitar and fiddle ornamentations, while ‘Heroes’ sings of the post-traumatic trials of an Iraq War veteran.

There’s whimsy in Clark’s lyrics and in his manner of delivering them in such a weathered voice, while the arrangements and production, which make use of viola and cello, are pleasantly understated, and ably performed by Clark’s backing band, several of whom he has mentored. There’s none of the saccharine, overinflated country music served up by many in Nashville.