"I've slept in the gutter more nights than I remember," Fester Hagood sings on "Painpill, KY," the first track from his new album Live from Rock Bottom. Sung in Hagood's gruff, twangy drawl, over a lazy, sweltering guitar backdrop, it sounds less like self-mythologizing and more like the painful, honest truth.

But Live from Rock Bottom's storyline exists apart from its creator. With a charismatic, worn-in voice not dissimilar to Patterson Hood's, Hagood recounts his characters' experience in and, if they're lucky, rise from their respective rock bottoms with a storyteller's talent, from the stagnant suburbanites of "All Them Pretty Families" to the doomed inmate at the heart of "Prison Bible."

Hagood is largely concerned with desperation and reformation, two topics familiar to anyone with any experience in Southern art or literature. Live from Rock Bottom is warm and comfortable, imbued with the sort of pleasant looseness characteristic of the best Americana records. It's a shame that such unassuming albums often go quietly unnoticed; sometimes, they have the potential to leave a mark.