David Gideon is the kind of larger-than-life character you’d read about in a Jack Kerouac novel: adventure seeking, well traveled, and a little bit wild, with stories to tell and songs to sing.

He mixes autobiography, tall tales, and old-school country twang on Lonesome Desert Strum. Recorded in Nashville and largely written in the American southwest, it’s an album that establishes Gideon as one of the genre’s unsung heroes. There are honky-tonk barn burners, campfire ballads, southern slow dances, and rootsy rave-ups, all glued together by a frontman who’s every bit as colorful as the songs he writes.