On I’m Glad Trouble Don’t Last Always, his fifth album and third for Bloodshot Records, Luke Winslow-King draws from a deep, dark creative well, turning heartbreak and divorce into an inspired soundtrack for picking up the pieces.

Electric and sentimentally raw, the album is part sonic travelogue, part handbook on navigating the stages of grief. It pulses through LWK’s geographical stomping grounds, starting with the pre-war jive of New Orleans, travelling the bloodlines that flow along the Mississippi River toward the Delta bottleneck-slide, and the funky meter of Memphis R&B. Further north, it takes a right for an infusion of greasy Chicago blues, and arrives at the headwaters of his birthplace in rural Michigan for some tell-‘em-like-it-is confessionals.

The album was written and recorded while Luke and his newly formed band were on a 2015 summer tour in Italy (and later finished in New Orleans’s Parlor Studios, mixed by Colin DuPuis, engineer for the Black Keys). The New Orleans-based polymath matches a technical wizardry with a thematic immediacy detailing a relationship in freefall. The songs unfold as diary entries put to his idiosyncratic blend of roots, pop and rock. It’s a Luke Winslow-King record unlike any he’s ever done; he’s found the light in the darkness and he’s plugging in and turning up to bare his soul.