Part songwriter, part street photographer, Josh Rouse steps out on his new album as an itinerant documentarian capturing the drifters, dreamers, and passing strangers who slip in and out of our lives, and finding himself somewhere in the frame too. Museums and Women is Rouse at his most hopeful and romantic, balancing casual poetry with wry humor across a collection of characters who are searching but never desperate, longing but never lonely.

Recorded in Nashville with longtime production partner Brad Jones (Chuck Prophet, Hayes Carll), the album came together almost by accident resulting in loose, unplanned studio sessions with Rouse on guitar, Jones on bass, and Fred Eltringham (Sheryl Crow, The Chicks) on drums, cut live and fresh, morning sessions followed by same-day overdubs. The title itself borrows from a John Updike book Rouse has always loved, and it fits: these songs treat ordinary human connection and it's absence like gallery-worthy art.

From the jangly optimism of opener "Spring" to the bossa nova drift of "Sunday In The Country" to the rain-soaked wandering of "Parnell Street," Rouse's narrators move through the world in transit but never lost, mapping the space between the people we long for and the people we become. "There's always a woman involved," Rouse says. "Love - or the search for it - is what ties them all together."

It's a fitting return for an artist NPR has called one of contemporary music's most engaging singer-songwriters, whose career spans from his celebrated 1998 debut Dressed Up Like Nebraska through the Goya Award-winning "Do You Really Want To Be In Love." Nearly three decades in, Rouse sounds unburdened and unhurried, chasing nothing but the joy of the work itself. Museums and Women is proof that the most compelling art is often found in life's quietest, most passing moments.