Adventures in Your Own Backyard

After the busy Wooden Arms in 2009, and too long on the tour trail, impressionistic piano-man Watson and his band dragged themselves home to Montreal, to familiarity, domesticity, all the “little things” that fed into this frankly more focused follow-up. Watson’s expressions of intimacy are ever epic, though, his lucent fingerwork and aching falsetto swaddled in luxurious textures, often with Western accents of one sort (plaintive lap steel) or another (the Morricone pastiche that arises in opener “Lighthouse”). In any case, Watson’s Backyard seems much more interesting than my own, which offers little more than a rusty cabano and occasional snarling raccoons.