The American landscape Nathan Bell captures on Black Crow Blue is bleak and lonesome but also graced with courage and nobility. These are unsparingly honest songs with the diamond-edged eloquence of Hemingway’s prose. Bell draws upon literary inspirations (including the poetry of his father) to craft his lyrics, then sets them to guitar-centered melodies rooted in classic folk and blues forms. A reoccurring character named Crow flits through a number of tracks that invoke the vast grandeur of the Southwest. In between, Bell offers an elegy to the late author Larry Brown (“Me and Larry”), embodies a hard-pressed working man (“Stone’s Throw”) and sketches the life of a mercenary in quick, sinister strokes (“The Striker”). Especially brilliant is “She Loves Only Blue,” a subtly drawn portrait of a woman, her memories and her music. Themes of struggle and mortality color much of the album, along with a hard-won sense of gratitude. “It’s a lucky man who’s got a job to do,” Bell sings in “My Favorite Year” — fortunately for us, he does his job very, very well.