A transplanted Texan originally from small-town Maine, Slaid Cleaves sure isn't running short on charm, and it's easy to see why his recent stint at Joe's Pub drew a packed house. His smooth southern drawl is somewhat affected, and while there's just enough twang to make it justifiably country, the substantial purity belongs to the traditions of folk music. His natural charisma comes more from his sensitivity to the stories he tells, his range of volume and intensity bringing the songs to life.

Cleaves is captivating to the point where even the most mundane of rhyming couplets becomes the most profound of lyrics. He naturally engages his audience faster with a word than a glance, and nothing proves this better than when the band unplugs everything and a hushed crowd settles in for an intimate acoustic set.

A traveling man himself, earning most of his pay on the road, Cleaves channels the spirit of old time minstrels, spinning simple, yet nonetheless sensational, tales about life and death and everything in between. As he clearly states in the title track opener of his new CD Wishbones, "This is real life…this ain't no reality show." The subject matter of his unpretentious, working-class tunes varies from touching tales of lost love and lost towns to the debauchery of betting on horses and getting drunk, but they're all unmistakably written as a tribute to the suffering of the common man.

Yet Cleaves' tales also portray his lucid, but always gentle, commentary on the world as it stands, and when he sings about the plight of Mexican immigrant farmhands, you can tell that he genuinely gives a damn. None of the sad stories on Wishbones stray too far from the ground he covered on his previous Rounder/Phlio release, Broke Down, but while these new ones convey the same resignation to the misfortunes of fate, it's now with a willingness, no longer a hopelessness, to just let it be.

A. Koledin