As a man who’s played guitar alongside Lucinda Williams, Ray Wylie Hubbard, and many others with pedigrees in roots music and singer/songwritering, Gurf Morlix knows firsthand how to write and perform songs with an honest and frequently forlorn sense. His own voice is just as distinctive an instrument and conveys a modesty that’s in perfect line with the stories he tells of his near-hometown (“Dirty Old Buffalo”) and his actual one (“Born in Lackawanna”). “Elephant’s Graveyard” is an elongated blues number worthy of Bob Dylan, while the elegant and perfect ballad “50 Years” recounts a young musician’s life from his early days to the present.