When he’s not performing or writing songs, Guy Clark can often be found in his woodshop building guitars. And that says a lot about Clark, who’s part artist and part craftsman, part genius and part handyman.

The Dark is an earthy yet erudite album. It starts with "Mud," a metaphysical yet hands-on rumination on the most elemental stuff, a kind of ashes-to-ashes and mud-to-mud song that ponders mud pies, crawfish, sunlight breaking after a rain, and the innate urge to squish mud through your bare feet. "Homeless" takes the disc from wry to somber, as Clark shifts his point of view from critical to sympathetic and finally to the voice of the homeless person himself.

But he’s a humanist, not a moralist. In "Arizona Star" he tells the story of one of the charismatic wild women who would materialize around musicians in the 1970s: "She was a pre-Madonna primadonna" who "made ‘real’ an oxymoron." There’s no dénouement, no implication that she ended up in the suburbs married to an orthodontist: we don’t know, and it doesn’t matter. "Dancin’ Days" continues this theme, though more ruefully. Impinging mortality also gets its due on "Bag of Bones" and on the anguished, absurd "Queenie’s Song," which is based on a true story about a friend’s dog that was shot and killed one New Year’s Day in Santa Fe. Against a spare setting of acoustic guitar, banjo, dobro, and the like, the 60-year-old Clark shows why over the decades he’s remained the best musical storyteller to come off the Texas-Tennessee shuttle: his stories have the ring of truth, even when he makes them up.