Matthew Payne's name is nowhere to be discerned on the cover of this recording, leading me at first to surmise that he's doing what the rare but bold singer-songwriter does: namely, bill himself as if a band. Once the envelope is opened and its content set on the player, however, the listener is exposed to an acoustic guitar and a lonesome folksinger's voice punctuated by harmonica. Soon one is not taken aback to be informed that Payne was born in Texas and continues to live there. Better Times was cut in, no surprise, an Austin studio.

I was introduced to this style (at least in its modern Southwestern iteration) decades ago when I found a discarded copy of Townes Van Zandt's For the Sake of the Song, his first album, when few (and nearly of all those Texas residents) knew who he was. Van Zandt, Guy Clark, Texas transplant Jerry Jeff Walker and a tiny handful of others invented a rootsy, often self-focused genre out of their involvement in the folk revival of the period, sometimes incorporating elements of country instrumentation into the sound along with their own original lyrics.

Texas singer-songwriters continue working into the 21st century, though more likely to call themselves "country" whether they fall there comfortably or not. I don't know what Payne calls himself, though a listening will make you think he knows at least something about tradition-based music: Gothic rural landscape, spare instrumental backing, ballads more akin to stories than to love songs, passing snatches of aged melodies. Plus a voice that calls up a Lone Star equivalent of Dylan's fresh-from-Minnesota antecedent.

The accompanying promotional material mentions "folk" as a genre indicator only once, while rightly noting the obvious and synonymous: the Appalachian touches. Whether stolen from the young Dylan from or from the older styles and songbag from which Bobby Zimmerman drew, I don't claim to know. I'm just describing impressions from what I'm hearing. In either case they're handled well; even if there are no fiddles and mandolins, there are James Stevens on harmonies and percussion, Marty Muse on pedal steel and resonator, and Kevin Smith on stand-up bass, each with a usually downbeat feeling evoked with requisite sorrow.

Payne's "Heartsick" is a rare visitation of country blues -- not "country" as in hillbilly or "blues" as in sad song, which is how the notes seem to mean the phrase. It also features a train sailing through hills and plains as well as psychoactive drugs cracking open the doors of a rambler's perception. Beyond that, romantic break-ups are more likely to occur outdoors than in, which is to say within the territory where -- at least in tradition's recall -- such things are properly accomplished.

My own impression is that Payne, an improvement on the usual, may be one disc short of something we'll all notice sticking in our memories.