A gig at the 12 Bar Club, where the audience capacity can probably stretch to 30 if you turn a blind eye to the fire regulations, seems scant reward for Tom Ovans's decades of hard slog.
Now nine albums into his career, including his latest offering Tombstone Boys, Graveyard Girls, Ovans is coming to resemble a musical Flying Dutchman, doomed to wander the earth interminably in the vain hope that some miracle will eventually set him free.
But for now, he contents himself with treating audiences to the dark and baleful insights he has gained from a life spent travelling around the United States, where he has taken all kinds of jobs - construction, woodworking, factory shifts - in order to subsidise his music.
Dressed in denim and a scruffy New York Yankees cap, Ovans hunches over his guitar and squeezes out his narratives in a parched croak which has prompted virtually everyone who's heard it to compare him to Bob Dylan.
A song like Gonna Be Missing You could be an outtake from some long lost Dylan session, and both Dylan and Ovans pay their own kind of tributes to rambling balladeer Woody Guthrie.
What Ovans signally lacks is Dylan's swirling repertoire of musical styles, while a dash of Bob's surreal wit would also have made this lengthy performance pass a little quicker. Ovans's stock-in-trade is the dark-night -of-the-soul ballad, cast in some doomy minor key and roving across entire continents, both geographical and metaphysical.
In Blues 4 Lenny, for instance, the narrator is watching "taillights disappear / Into the swollen mystic night" while he ponders the history of the American west and goes looking for a smack dealer. In Racine, he's sitting in a bar with a few down-at-heel strangers, picking over the debris of an empty life while "staring at the bottom of some old coffee cup".
Cool Daddy, introduced by some reflections on George W Bush's fondness for exacting the death penalty during his tenure as governor of Texas, is an acid commentary on the way the rich and powerful can afford to ignore the poor and powerless.
Ovans's songs can grip you with the force of their images, but after a while the relentless litany of loss and rootlessness starts to resemble mere melodramatic soul-dredging. Maybe Ovans never tires of suffering, but he should spare a thought for his listeners.
