Early in this rural travelogue of an album, Grayson Capps finds an arrowhead in the dirt and makes you care about that for three and a half minutes. Finding meaning in such piddly events is what a good songwriter does. Doing so in a lively, roots-rock setting is what Capps does here.

The mood here is largely a throwback to the late ’60s and early ’70s, when rock songwriters went back to the country to get their proverbial heads together (It even opens with a song called “Back to the Country”). Of course, Capps went back there for different reasons—there are flood and storm references in more than one song—but a sense of quiet rejuvenation runs through the album, even when it rocks. And it’s not all sweetness and light, as the narrative “Ike” finds the singer having a chance meeting with the prostitute next door. Here again, Capps applies his storytelling mettle to suggest a lot more than actually winds up happening.

The sound here is suitably warm and vintage; Capps’ having the gifted producer/engineer Trina Shoemaker as a partner surely doesn’t hurt. As a roots album with a somber edge, this slots comfortably next to the latest efforts from Anders Osborne and the Drive-By Truckers. But Capps still has a foot in the bar-band world, which isn’t a bad thing: The blues-rocker “Big Black Buzzard” and the crass but funny “Big Ole Woman” are the kind of piledrivers that his former band Stavin’ Chain used to specialize in. The loose concept does fall apart on the end—the doomsaying spoken track “Fear Fruit Bearing Tree” seems a little out of place—but there are worse ways to end an album than with five minutes’ worth of slide guitar slinging.