A Hand Through the Cellar Door is, in many ways, Temple's most straightforward collection of song-storying tunes to date.

There are tales of dysfunctional, broken homes and of dysfunctional, broken people. "Birds of Late December," with its fluttering, nimble fingerpicking, paints an exacting but impressionistic portrait of divorce through the eyes of an exceptionally wistful child.

In both "Maryanne Was Quiet" and "The Case of Louis Warren" we follow two characters whose lives unravel in very different ways, though their central question is the same: After you shed all the things you think make you who you are, what is left? Temple is creating small, confident stories with a massive scope.

Yes, while the tales Temple weaves are bleak, the aura of hope never quite fades from the picture.

He turns the tragedies of human folly into a celebration of our eccentricities