On 2000’s Public Domain, songwriter Dave Alvin covered folk songs that, as the album’s title implied, were in the public domain. Well before Springsteen, he showed how lively classic folk songs can be, and Alvin’s “Shenandoah” is far lovelier and more elegant than Springsteen’s. On West of the West, Alvin turns in his second cover collection, this time singing a love letter to his native California. He takes songs by writers as different as Merle Haggard, Jackson Browne and Tom Waits and makes them all sound like one person wrote them. More intriguingly, they all sound like the writer might have been him.

 

Part of that is obviously musical. Alvin finds the blues that underlie many of these songs and brings them out, often with the shuffle beat he loves. He also sings everything from Appalachian folk songs to the Beach Boys’ “Surfer Girl” with laidback understatement, trusting the songs to do the heavy lifting. More importantly, the same sensibility that guides his songwriting also guides his song selection here. West of the West is an album of underdogs and strivers, with spare writing that grants them all a quiet nobility. Consequently, the album never feels like a detour, nor does it seem like Alvin is parading his favorite writers. This may sound too grand, but his overarching theme since his days with the Blasters has been working class American culture—its music included—and West of the West continues that theme beautifully.