Let Life Flow sounds like Kenny Neal is trying to make a blues album, but he keeps getting interrupted by life. It has songs you expect: A fine version of Ivory Joe Hunter’s “Since I Met You Baby,” the grooving “Blues, Leave Me Alone,” and other tales of heartache and infidelity. But periodically, the real world pokes its head into the album starting with the title track, which opens the album. It’s hard not to hear the opening couplet, “Just when you think you got it all figured out / here comes something you never dreamed about,” as anything but a comment on contracting Hepatitis C, which sidelined him for over a year. The song’s about acceptance, and he keeps his references to the tribulations sufficiently vague that the problems we learn to deal with could be anybody’s.

Similarly, “Louisiana Stew” could be just another celebration of his home state, but it’s impossible to hear Louisiana songs today without the specters of Katrina and Rita looming darkly behind them. He closes the album with the anti-war track “It Don’t Make Sense You Can’t Have Peace” by Willie Dixon from 1988. Neal’s at his gravest here, as if he finally found something worse than illness, heartbreak, hurricanes and meanness, something he couldn’t reconcile into the voice of the blues—war. The horns recall 1970s reggae charts, but Neal’s guitar never steps out of genre, and the urgency in his voice is rooted in the church. Together, they keep the funky groove from straying too far afield. As personal as “Let Life Flow” is, it’s the last track that will stay with you, and more for the performance than the words themselves.