Randall Bramblett has been around long enough to know what excellence in music really means. But it takes more than that to make an album like No More Mr. Lucky, his debut release for New West Records. You need to have experienced your full share of the downs along with the ups. For every knock you've taken, you need to have enough faith and strength to come out on top in the end. And you need to have a gift for translating it all into songs that mean something to everyone who's taking that ride.

No More Mr. Lucky comes from that place within Bramblett where life and art join together. Each song has its unique feel, from the restless looped groove of "Get In Get Out" to the delicate ruminations in "Lost Enough" and on to the fusion of raw, bluesy guitar and steamy horn riffs in "Hard to Be a Human" and the propulsive rock of "End of the String".

Each has its own story too, told in language that marks Bramblett, through his own work and his collaborations with gifted co-writers, as an everyman's poet. But there's also a thread that weaves through No More Mr. Lucky -- a sense of being on the move, of running from or toward something. These are songs for people who have not yet reached a place where they can rest.

You can hear it in the lyrics: "All you can do is save yourself; leave the rest behind"... "Where are all your tears? When you're lost enough, you'll find them"... "I want to run from the things that I love"... and, from "Aching for a Dream", "You can't slow down; the signal won't last."

"I had Neal Cassidy in mind for that one," Bramblett says. "I was reading a lot of Beat stuff at the time. My co-writers and I made sure that all these songs connect to things we've gone through, although they're not strictly autobiographical. They all come from a feeling place; that's why there are so many images in them. I don't write a lot of straight-ahead songs. My songs are always more open-ended and ambiguous."

Bright spots illuminate the sometimes-shadowy terrain of Mr. Lucky. "Sunflower" is one such moment -- a painting, in music and words, of the hope that persists through times of uncertainty. "A lot of that song came from my son," Bramblett remembers. "He called me one day -- he was fifteen or sixteen at the time -- to tell me that his existence had become so routine that he was bored out of his mind. But he did something about it: He went out and bought a sunflower. That struck me as the coolest thing, that you can transcend your routine by reaching for something beautiful."

It's a message that comes from Bramblett's heart. He was exploring these themes on solo projects long before his affiliation with the pioneering band Sea Level, or his sessions with artists as diverse as Levon Helm and Roger Glover, Gregg Allman and Traffic, Widespread Panic and Gov't Mule. "You work on your house, struggle through daily responsibilities -- and you try to find some kind of transcendence. I still struggle with that; it's steady and real."

Sound familiar? That's why No More Mr. Lucky is more than a personal chronicle -- it's a reflection of life, and an affirmation that it's worth living. The message is presented on "Hard to Be a Human" with tongue in cheek, as Adam -- presumably hitting all the singles bars in Eden -- is "looking for my baby, an apple in her hand." We're still looking on "End of the String," through a prism of "bottles to bottles, end to end." But in "God Was in the Water" someone else is looking for us, "casting out a line into the shadows ... but no one's biting."

Produced by John Keane (Bottle Rockets, Indigo Girls, Cowboy Junkies, Vic Chesnutt), No More Mr. Lucky features tight performances from Bramblett's longtime writing partners Davis Causey and Jason Slatton on guitars, along with Nashville stalwart Michael Rhodes on bass and Joe Bonadio, whose recent credits include Martin Sexton and Shawn Colvin. Bramblett, as usual, plays a number of instruments -- including an intriguing, nearly subsonic solo on "God Was in the Water" that sounds for sure like a bass clarinet (but isn't).

It all adds up to the best of endeavors: virtuoso writing and playing that's within every listener's emotional grasp. These are songs that will endure for years to come, as echoes of our time.