A Blessing and a Curse found the Drive-By Truckers uncharacteristically uncertain. They’d got what they wanted and were trying to figure out how to live with it, including the three-guitar, three-songwriter lineup that was starting to seem like a chore to deal with. The only flat Truckers show I’ve seen came during SXSW the year the album was released, when the democratic songwriting circle of a setlist kept the show from catching fire. The album held up, but it was no surprise when Jason Isbell left to go solo.

On Brighter Than Creation’s Dark, the remaining members remind themselves why they started making music in the first place. Patterson Hood says he had written 500 songs before the band cut its first album, and that compulsive desire to dramatize the people in his world defines the 19-song album. And unlike the last few albums, there’s no overarching theme beyond a general desire to accord common people the dignity they deserve.

Loss and struggle are central to Trucker songs—his and Mike Cooley’s, though the challenges in Cooley songs are almost always undercut by his lyrical and vocal slyness. When he sings, “I used to hate the fool in me / but only in the morning / now I tolerate him all day long,” the line sounds so matter-of-fact that it seems like someone should have written it already. Cooley’s songs also help balance Hood’s tendency toward the heavy. This time out, Hood has two songs about war, and “That Man I Shot” presents a soldier mid-rationalization over the Iraqi he killed.

Like the band’s shows, Brighter Than Creation’s Dark is probably too long. At 19 songs and almost 80 minutes, there’s a lot to digest and it takes a while to digest it. As sprawling as it is, though, it sounds like a band very comfortable with itself and what it does right now, and that ease makes the time fly by.