Grief and gratitude provide the building blocks for Hannam's eighth album, though I have to say the strongest tracks are loaded at the front and end, opening with the irresistibly catchy relationship mission statement of 'Long Haul' ("I aint in it for the short term/I'm in it for the slow burn"). It's followed by 'Hurry Up Kid', a simple fingerpicked love letter from a father to their child that moves from the desire to see them grow to the desire to slow down the passage of time before they leave the nest.

Featuring Steve Dawson on National steel and pedal steel, 'Wonderful Things' is another naggingly catchy number, a folksy chug celebration of all the good things in life, the tempo scampering along on pedal steel tracks on the playful 'Beautiful Mess', a duet with Shaela Miller in the old school Cash and Carter tradition and featuring Fats Kaplan on fiddle solo.

Things keep moving nicely with the reflective acoustic balladry of 'Old Friend', a tribute to a buddy whose passed on, but never gave up the fight ("You raised Cain 'till the very end/I know you're raiding hell in heaven tonight").

He keeps the bar raised with the waltzing 'What I Know Now', a confessional of regrets (telling dad to treat his wife better, stealing from mum's purse, not being open with his lover about his faults), but then it takes a bit of a dip with 'Meat Draw', a bouncy, dobro, banjo, fiddle and steel flourished good time song about a small town meat raffle that is amusingly playful ("Each of them is hoping/They won't go home alone/With a little luck they'll be groping a 20 oz T-bone") but unlikely to be one you'll be digging out to play again in 20 years time, or even two weeks.

A sketch of a low rent greasy spoon where a nightly congregation of misfits and losers hang out, 'Twilight Diner' takes a bluesy groove riding an organ riff but never really digs in. Things pick up again though with the slow waltz and melancholic fiddle of 'Other Side Of The Curve', a pandemic-informed number about not being there to share another's burden, but finally being reunited, the momentum further regained with the Tom Paxton-like 'Round and Round' with its memories of his grandfather, the confusion wrought by the pandemic, the need to find faith and keep his own children reassured. It ends with the simple acoustic picked, aching pedal steel colours of 'Young At Heart', a sort of variation on Dylan's 'Forever Young', a wish for a long life full of friends, family and joy and that "may you heart fill with tinder/May your matches all be dry/When you're left with only cinder/May the last coals never die". These are songs of small victories, and, despite my two track reservations, an album of true triumph.