On his last time around, in Wild Birds Warble (see my review in this space on 29 June 2024), Jubal Lee Young paid loving tribute to his father Steve Young, revisiting a number of that revered performer's originals and covers. The elder Young's "Seven Bridges Road," most famously associated with the Eagles, ranks in my long-held judgment among the most powerful songs about Southern roots that anybody has ever written. Waylon Jennings's recording of "Lonesome, On'ry & Mean" (a song not included here) evokes a memorably unpleasant character. Only a handful of songs about Hank Williams' legacy hit as hard as "Montgomery in the Rain." Young, who died in 2016, remains among the most compelling country-folk songwriters I've ever heard. He was also an unforgettable vocalist who stood out in any crowd in which he happened to be standing.

Jubal Lee Young has something of his father's singing voice, albeit a somewhat muted version of same. But in his own writing, which comprises all of Squirrels, he takes the songs out of the rural South, where Steve put his, and sets them in more urban landscapes. He offers up more social commentary than his dad, who was at least publicly apolitical, and curses a whole lot more. (Warning: Four of the 16 tracks are heavily, even exhaustingly, f-bombed and possibly fatal to the faint of heart.) There are elements of country and folk here without consistent muscles to the specifics, though Young's band, acoustic and percussion-less, would bear a modest resemblance to Roy Acuff's Smoky Mountain Boys if the latter were known for inclusion of a banjo. They do share an accordion.

To be blunt about it, I'm not sure I'd have had any particular interest in hearing this album if I hadn't gone ahead and actually listened to it before reflecting on the prospect excessively. Merely described, it brings to mind just another singer-songwriter exercise. But when I put it on the player, I soon learned that the younger Young has his own personality, including out-of-the-ordinary melodies and lyrics, and is no clone of his contemporaries.

The sensibility is Los Angeles and Nashville. Among the consequences, piousness -- religious and/or cultural -- is not in long supply. Young's welcome irreverent humor is abundant, but it's also smart and multi-faceted, for instance in the wit-infused "Don't Be a Dickhead." On first hearing, it seems to be a send-up of biblical admonitions, but on subsequent ones it becomes a sincere plea for bedrock decency. You might say it delivers humor with the sermon, or vice versa. It was the first hint that I might like this guy. Young comes back to the theme, without the jokes, in the sweet-natured "Kind All the Time."

Played like Woody Guthrie (or Bruce Springsteen imitating Woody), "Weird" is an affecting liberal's lament for this cruel and duplicitous era, addressing the sort of amoral madness that has too many of us shouting red-faced at the television screen dangerously often. Young manages to keep his temper. He prefers to ask gentler -- albeit still probing -- questions. He's less patient on "Welcome to Nashville, Asshole," where his spleen is vented on the transplants who have turned Music City into an upscale corporate neighborhood where non-wealthy mortals who shaped the place are now being invited to leave it. (Well, maybe. As early as the 1960s Nashville was being called "Cashville." Not fondly, in case you're wondering.)

I've never heard songs much like the title tune and "Hand-Painted Portuguese Punch Bowl" heretofore. They pass cheerfully through one's ears. Even the inevitable love songs, if not ubiquitous, are bearable. Happily, though with a different focus in this generation, the Young sound continues, rendering 2025 a year in which the survival of sanity looks like a marginally more hopeful prospect.