Lawrence’s will as composer and arranger, and to a much lesser degree as a light-voiced singer, that makes each song expand and transform. This is a live-in-the-studio record with a burly band, full choir and several strong vocal soloists, including Blanche McAllister-Dykes and Kim McFarland-Anderson. If you don’t like a track at first, wait three minutes and notice your reaction. Throughout “YRM (Your Righteous Mind)” he’s always got something up his sleeve. It’s an art about the real-time shifting of feelings, and the bandleader, songwriter and singer Donald Lawrence is alive to that. Gospel depends on the closely monitored connection between artist and audience. Hiatt is to perform at City Winery on Friday and Saturday.) JON PARELES The songs get the gravity and mystery they’ve earned. Hiatt makes each melody distinctive, and Kevin Shirley’s production gives the instruments space and resonance. The songs’ structures are meat and potatoes: opening guitar riff, verse, chorus, bridge. And when he looks beyond the domestic, he sees ruin: “Creeks and rivers dried up, down around my place/My woman’s tears are cried up, down around my place.” In “Damn This Town,” a grim march about a deeply dysfunctional family, he allows, “I got a sister who’s a thief and she’s filled with hate/Now she’s got a job working for the state.” But even his celebratory moments, like “I Love That Girl,” hint at tough back stories. In “Adiós to California” the singer suddenly finds himself alone and bereft: “Two cigarettes from the package gone/You must have thought about it just that long.” And he draws a lesson from moments like that in the unplugged, toe-tapping bounce of “All the Way Under”: “I don’t trust a man that ain’t been lost/I don’t trust a woman that ain’t been double-crossed.” “I hide in the darkness/It’s all I can do,” he sings in “Till I Get My Lovin’ Back,” a slow country waltz about a man who can only hope for a reunion.

Love has to pull his narrators out of deeper holes this time, reflected in minor chords and mournful realizations.

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