Nathaniel Bellows’ The Old Illusions (Harmon Blunt Music) casts this acclaimed poet and librettist in a singer-songwriter mode reminiscent of Greg Brown. His lush, warm baritone and acoustic guitar are balanced precariously on arrangements full of spiderweb shadows and glittering edges.

The dark thrum running through the veins of Bellows’ songs is questioning. Vocals swirl and wrench around his center of gravity, rising and falling, wordless notes and lines congealing into words, most notably an echoing male voice flatly repeating the word “lie,” pulling the narrative down from certainty to doubt. Instruments appear, throw gleaming daggers that shatter into texture, and disappear. “The Reason,” with its suspended piano and circling, surging guitar, orbits choruses tied together by alliteration and assonance, underlining the struggle. Bellows’ begged question, “Did somebody somewhere just use my name in the way one would say ‘I now know me?’” turns into a growl when it changes to, “Could somebody somewhere just soothe my brain? The thundering thoughts and the silence.” On “What Would You Do,” Bellows peels apart a small town scandal like an onion, starting with the finding of two corpses, slipping between the heads of various characters and the concrete detail of the town. Along the way, he talks about regret as poison and the impossibility of finding one’s way home.

Even in the heart of the frustration breathing through these songs, there’s a wild delight in the sensual quality of language. In closer “The Calm,” Bellows cartwheels through lines like, “In the calm and the psalm and the salt that’s thrown over the shoulder of the saddest of soldiers who’s carving a doll from the soap in the stall of his horse.” The Old Illusions is a moving record that reconstructs the past through what was handed down and, more, what we still tell ourselves. There isn’t a wasted note, inflection, or moment here. Indeed, there is no time for showy virtuosity when there’s so much to say.