Songwriter and singer John Prine, who died in 2020, made a long, knotty career by enlivening the stories he sang with a fiction writer’s eye for the details of ordinary folk leading ordinary lives. To paraphrase Wallace Stevens: when slightly turned, those ordinary folk become metaphors. Born roughly a decade after Prine, Dave Alvin has in his lengthy career mined similar terrain, on which men and women stumble, looking for love, a calling, or a reason.

I first heard Alvin’s “Wanda and Duane” in ...