Peter Cooper, whose ghost floats over much of Circle & Square, died as a consequence of an accidental fall on Dec. 6, 2022, at the age of 52. For 14 years this South Carolina native was the much praised country-music columnist for Nashville's Tennessean, a post he left in 2014 to take up a leadership position at the Country Music Hall of Fame & Museum. He also recorded solo albums, then one with steel-guitar master Lloyd Green, several with singer-songwriter Eric Brace, and others with Brace and Thomm Jutz, a German immigrant with an education in bluegrass and traditional folk music.

While Cooper's knowledge of the country genre was legendarily immense, his own original songs and recordings were only passingly country, and usually not even that. He, Brace and Jutz wrote their own kind of material, which drew on unique inspirations and evaded cliches. And country songs are overwhelmingly cliches, specifically of relationships, often aided and abetted by alcohol consumption.

You can also find some monumental self-defined artists such as Johnny Cash and Tom T. Hall, both years gone from studio and stage (and earthly existence itself for that matter), who carried into a deaf contemporary world echoes of the storytelling traditions of mountain and other oldtime music. Cooper and Brace championed Hall in particular after Hall's string of hits ran out and the industry lost patience with his refusal to sound like everybody else. In his post-star career Hill, rooted in bluegrass, wrote (with wife Dixie Hall) for the working professionals who preserved that glorious stringband racket in updated guise. These late songs, I might add, reward the seeking out.

Each of the 10 songs here has its own distinct personality, its meaning -- interestingly -- not always instantly apparent. Still, one is certain that each has a meaning, which is far from certain in Dylan's more arcane rants. The most difficult to plumb is the title song. If it's what I think it is, it may be the only one I've ever heard to consider the shared universe of human experience and geometric form. Not that I'm swearing to the interpretation. A banjo ballad relates the death of a celebrated regional artist ("Thomas Hart Benton") who happened to paint murals of the same landscape, some of it populated by backwoods musicians, that Woody Guthrie rambled through in his young adult life.

But if any particular vision wells up overall, it's one shaped by intelligent, literate composers with a humane sensibility smartly applied to unexpected contexts and situations. These include the Mexican laborer employed in an American car factory in the 1930s ("Diego in Detroit"), the sensation of shock and enlightenment that Walt Whitman's mystic friend R. M. Bucke called "cosmic consciousness" ("On the Back of a Horse") and, grimly, a town murdered by engineers for the alleged economic betterment of the region ("Fontana Dam").

"Life of the Mind" concerns what it's like to be an artist and to think as often and as intently as one can accomplish. While it is a dazzling piece of work, it will not make you cry. "Nothing Hurts," Brace's wrenching calling up of memories of his late friend Peter Cooper, will do that for you.