I’ve been living with folkie James McMurtry’s Just Us Kids for the last few weeks deciding how I feel about it. His previous album Childish Things had one great track, “We Can’t Make it Here,” which spelled out these hard times with a ruthlessly precise deadpan. I kept waiting for the song that hit me like that, and I’m still waiting. But it’s unfair to ask McMurtry to deliver one song as good as his best song on every album.

McMurtry’s people are Springsteen’s people, only southern, and his are suffering just like Bruce’s, only without the E Street Band draping echoes of girl group records to romanticize their struggles. Depicting their hard lives is a form of protest music for McMurtry, which leaves the songs flinty, ornamentless and devastatingly to the point—this world can make an outlaw out of anyone. He sympathizes with people, but not so much that he’ll candy coat a thing, not even on “Cheney’s Toy,” which portrays today’s young soldier as a pawn.