For the first CD of the second part of his career, Tom Russell has gone back 40 years for some of the memories and images that bring to life the striking songs on “Blood and Candle Smoke.”

“You think I’m some jive Americana singer-songwriter, but I’m a criminologist, buddy,” the self-described “crank loner outsider” says with a laugh.

“Criminology” and “East of Woodstock, West of Vietnam” refer to Russell’s time teaching criminology in 1969 in Nigeria, where he was arrested on arrival at the airport for taking photos of the Biafra war. He had a gun shoved in his face, and it wouldn’t be the last time; that’s a risk one takes playing rock ’n’ roll in skid row dives in British Columbia. Russell has not kept those days a secret, exactly, but he hasn’t painted, written or sung about them until now.

“It’s like old bullet wounds, old bullets deep inside you that take 30 years come to the surface,” says Russell, who will perform in St. Louis on Friday and in Mount Olive, Ill., on Saturday. “In a lot of ways, I was in denial about my African experience because it was linked to an academic job, and I didn’t tell people for years that I had a master’s in criminology.

“And then one day I woke up and thought that this is very rich territory and I’m not ashamed of it.”

“Blood and Candle Smoke” is a rich marriage of literary and cinematic images that take on a nearly tangible life over the desert mystic music of the Arizona band Calexico and its trumpet player, Jacob Valenzuela. It also is enriched by the keyboards of Barry Walsh and harmonies of Gretchen Peters, who will play with him in Mount Olive.

In “The Most Dangerous Woman in America,” written about the labor organizer Mother Jones who is buried in Mount Olive, the landscape changes to the Midwest.

“I’m always impressed when I drive through the Midwest around St. Louis in the winter, in these farm towns and coal mining towns where the mines are closed,” says Russell, who began writing songs in the mid-1980s while in his 30s. “It’s like the opening of a movie to me, and I think I got it in that song.”
Russell took his time with this CD, and several of the songs have been thoroughly road-tested over the past two to three years.

“I’ve been working harder,” says Russell, whose paintings again adorn the CD package, and whose essays and stories appear on his blog (russelltom.blogspot.com), including one entry for each of the 12 songs on the album. He is also working on a book of essays about the West, one of which is about Juarez, Mexico; his hometown of El Paso, Texas; and the Mexican drug wars. It has been published on the Rumpus blog.

“I think of this as part two of my career,” he says. “I write three to four hours a day of prose, or work on songs, and that approach of day-in and day-out taking another look at every song for two or three years paid off. I’ve also been painting more.

“They are all linked in some way. You know when it’s not happening, where you finally say, ‘This is clever, but it’s not good enough,’ and then you go back to work.”