One song into his solo set at AmericanaFest, Willie Watson mentioned his new album and heard an indecipherable shout from the back of the room, something few performers appreciate.

“Is there a question, sir?” he asked, straining to see through the stage lights.

“Can we get the album here?” the person yelled.

“Yes!” fiddler Sami Braman chimed in helpfully. “There’s a merch table in the other room.”

“I should have mentioned that,” Watson said sheepishly. “I guess it’s time for me to be a Willie Watson fan.”

It is, indeed.

A fixture on the Americana music scene for decades, both as a founding member of Old Crow Medicine Show and longtime collaborator with David Rawlings and Gillian Welch, among many others, the 44-year-old Watson waited a long time to step into the spotlight. He’s done it with a self-titled album of singular beauty.

There is Watson’s voice, of course, an achingly high tenor that’s at once ethereal and weighty, with the emotional heft these hard-earned tracks demand. It’s just right for the songs, which are decorated with his own struggles with sobriety and spirituality. And the songs themselves feel both aged and perfectly ready. Working with co-writer Morgan Nadler, Watson has mined his own battles to assemble a hopeful tableau.

“Real Love” feels like the emotional anchor of the album, and a song people will be singing and listening to for a long time. At his AmericanaFest show Watson dedicated it to his wife.

“I thought our love was true

I sang those ‘Worried Man Blues’

I was chained to the heart of a ghost that I never knew

I’m up above it now

I see for miles around

‘Cause this is the only real love that I have ever known.”

“It’s a love song I wrote for my wife,” Watson said when he introduced the song on Instagram. “It kinda turned out to be the story of my life, and it’s clear now that she’s standing in the center of everything. We’ve been looking for each other for a long time, and now we can’t even remember the struggle it took to get here.”

I try to pay attention when I have a strong emotional response to a song. This one made me feel calm, happy, and grateful.

Even one of the songs not written by Watson feels at home in this collection. A murder ballad by the great Stan Rogers, “Harris and the Mare” is a simple cry for help from a peaceful man who has been forced into violence.

“Slim and the Devil” is a lively shuffler that has Watson modernizing a Sterling A. Brown poem, “Slim Greer in Hell.” With the closing line: “that place was Dixie that I took for hell,” Watson seems to be making the most political statement on the album, a suggestion that America hasn’t come very far from the pre-civil rights era Brown wrote about in 1932.

“Reap ‘Em in the Valley,” a spoken word memory layered over an old Carter family melody, seems to be a meditation on authenticity and passion.

Watson talks about his current life in Los Angeles, a place he said where it is difficult to “believe in God.” He then recalls a memory from his teenage years in rural upstate New York, when he sang for friends at a high school party in an apple orchard. Among the attendees was an older folk singer named Ruby Love, and Watson says it was the first time he ever cried while he sang a song. When he was finished, Love gave Watson an approving smile, took his guitar from him, and sang “Worried Man Blues.”

“I come from a place,” Watson says on the track, “where it’s real easy to believe in God.”

Watson recorded the album in L.A. with producers Gabe Witcher (Punch Brothers) and Kenneth Pattengale (Milk Carton Kids). A solid backing band included legendary Heartbreakers keyboardist Benmont Tench, Paul Kowert on bass, Dylan Day on guitar, Jason Boesel on drums, and Sami Braman on fiddle.

Watson has released two other albums of traditional folk songs, and they are both worth listening to.

Find out more about Willie Watson at the links below: