Kiely Connell

For Kiely Connell, the Indiana-born, Nashville-based singer-songwriter with the steely twang and the incisive lyrics, music is an opportunity for communion and connection. On her gritty and generous second album, My Own Company, she assembles a narrative of loss and recovery. It's a feat of storytelling, one that depicts different events — the death of an old friend, the abrupt end of a yearslong relationship, the gradual realization that your own company is enough — and finds the emotional commonalities between them.

A confessional and compassionate songwriter, she fills the album with vivid details that root the music in the real world and prompts comparisons to Lucinda Williams, John Prine, and Steve Earle. "Restless Bones," the beating heart of My Own Company, is a solemn reminiscence about the suicide of a high school friend back in northwest Indiana. It sounds immediate in its concern and regret. On "You Won't Notice It," a quietly heartbreaking song about all the small lapses in communication that drive lovers apart, Connell slips down into her lower register in the final moments and teases out syllables just past their breaking point.

The album concludes with a sequence of songs about recovery — about literally recovering your autonomy, your mission, your sense of self. The outraged "Damn Hands" surveys the hellish landscape of the Nashville dating scene. She wrote the ominous "Anesthesia" during her first holiday alone, and the song evokes the intense alienation that left her feeling hollowed out. Wisely, Connell does not offer a pat ending to the album, but leaves the story open-ended and the emotions raw, the implication being that these matters don't resolve themselves when the songs end.

Connell took her songs out to Portland, Oregon, to track at Martine's studio with a band that includes bassist Nate Query (the Decemberists), drummer Andrew Borger (Tom Waits, Norah Jones), and Connell's long-time guitarist Drew Kohl. Together, they fleshed out Connell's songs, gently expanding them out of country and taking them into new realms, emphasizing her ideas without intruding on her vocals.

The process of making such a tough-minded and open-hearted album was cathartic for Connell, and My Own Company has already struck a chord with fans. On a recent tour with Tommy Prine, she was surprised when fans approached her to tell their own stories of suicide and to thank her for putting her experiences to music.