The area between Breaux Bridge, Louisiana and Hunstville, Texas—a space roughly described by guitar slinger Mike Zito, musically and lyrically, on his fourth album—is stuffed to bursting with unknown roots musicians too in love with their own mythology. You know the type: they killed a gator in the swamp and got the juju hand after drinking too much whiskey with them wild, wild women. But Zito, a St. Louis transplant, actually bothered to use these totems to tell a real story; if his lyrics and liner notes are to be believed, he had at least two substance abuse problems and a trail of broken friendships, some of them sexual, before God and the Lone Star State saved his life.

Zito’s actual backstory, coupled with the kind of soul you can’t help but pick u if hailing from that close to Memphis, probably explains why his particular brand of blues-rock seems not only more honest, but more flexible, than many of his contemporaries. He likes to hit those one-four-five chord changes and AAB rhymes, but as someone who came by the blues second- or third-hand, Zito also likes to rock songs out and change them up. And you can tell he’s real because his songs work on a small, human scale: the travelogue “Rainbow Bridge” really sounds like it was written on the way; “Take It Easy” captures the difficulty in loving a broken man; and the uncompromising stomp of “Don’t Think ‘Cause You’re Pretty” casts a cold eye on the artifice of loving a memory. As for his guitar playing, it’s mostly not an issue—Zito takes any number of great solos but this is that rare blues-rock album where the songs say at least as much as the performances. Sonny Landreth, Delbert McClinton, and Susan Cowsill probably sensed this, which is why they came to the intervention—when it’s really on, Gone to Texas cuts through the old clichés to find real blood.