E-Mail This Article to a Friend Born again Peter C. Johnson and Catie Curtis deliver BY TED DROZDOWSKI

Peter C. Johnson’s voice sounds like something that rolled out of the primordial ooze. It creaks like a stone bearing the weight of its fellows compounded by gravity. And indeed, there’s plenty of gravity in Johnson’s lyrics. Especially the songs that chronicle his battle with alcohol and his struggle to find something akin to a spiritual center in his life. That said, there’s nothing preachy or polemical about the dozen numbers on the long-time Cambridge songwriter’s new Soul Sherpa, which has just been released by the Hi-N-Dry music collective. Instead, there’s the truth of experience. Born in Worcester, Johnson arrived on the Cambridge music scene in 1968. "I came here to avoid the draft. I went to graduate school in theology, which was a certain deferment in those days. I enrolled at the Episcopal Divinity School, which, I might add, was a hotbed of dope smoking and drugs."

In effect, he majored in playing music in bars and honing a taste for drink and substances. He also grew as an artist. Like his friend Bonnie Raitt, who was attending Radcliffe at the time and just igniting her career, Johnson was managed by Dick Waterman. "Dick also managed a lot of the great bluesmen, like Son House and John Hurt. I would go over to his office and open the door, and a cloud of cigar smoke would billow out. Dick’s clients would be in there gambling for days."

Although Johnson never became a blues player himself, he did learn a basic lesson from the old-timers. "They got me out of my very constrained white Anglo-Saxon thinking and able to write about things like pain. I’ve been writing in that vein since the early ’70s, but many of the aspects of my life over the past few years have forced me to look even deeper inside and be more confessional. Part of that has to do with the addiction issues I’ve had." It’s also has a fundamental effect on his music. Johnson’s own guitar work is spare to the point of being almost bone-naked — just enough chords and notes to support the lines he delivers with a concision and clarity akin to that of New England’s folksinger laureate, Bill Morrissey. His voice also sounds a bit like Morrissey’s, though his æsthetic may be closer to Lou Reed’s.

Another result of his exposure to blues was the Manic Depressives, a band he had in the early ’70s who fused that style with jazz and rock. The members included guitarist Paul Rishell, of the award-winning country blues duo Paul Rishell and Annie Raines, and Boston jazz stalwart John Payne, the reedman who played on Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks. Both men appear on Soul Sherpa, which feels like a summation of Johnson’s last 30 years, a life spent making albums for major and indie labels, producing and writing tunes for advertising, and dropping in and out of the music biz to do everything from selling real estate to hanging sheet rock.

Johnson got sucked back in for good, at least so far, in 1998, when Raitt invited him to join her on stage at Harborlights (now FleetBoston Pavilion). Guitarist and former Treat Her Right co-frontman David Champagne also prodded him into writing more songs. And with the help of a cast of local veterans including Asa Brebner and Billy Conway, Johnson ended a 20-year break in recording with 2001’s self-released Bloodshot. That disc was strong and gritty, but not quite as profound or revealing as Soul Sherpa. "This album was made in the midst of a pretty enormous conflict for me. There was a lot of focusing in on whether I wanted to kill myself or survive. There was a lot of alcohol. In the middle of its production, I ended up checking into Crossroads, which is the rehab center started by Eric Clapton in Antigua. Those experience really shook my tree, and a lot of these songs fell out."

The opening title track allows Johnson to introduce himself — the idea is that he needs a "Soul Sherpa," someone to help him hump the heavy burden on his spirit. It’s something most of us have wished for at one time or another, and his dry, slow vocal performance sounds like that of a man who’s been hefting a considerable load. The album’s best track is "Higher Power," with Bonnie Raitt and Kris Delmhorst. Raitt sounds beautiful and seductive lending her voice to Johnson’s inner devil, the urge that makes him want to drink and indulge. "That’s a direct exploration of my disease. If you’re gonna fight something, you’ve got to be able to put your finger on it." It’s also a theme that recalls his days with Waterman and those blues players, men to whom the conflict between good and evil and temptation and the righteous path was a daily reality.

Laurie Sargent lends her warm voice to "Beautiful in Blue," which illuminates both sides of a fading relationship with such cleanly written detail that its axis of sadness is palpable. "Burka" was prompted by a photo Johnson saw of a Muslim woman — no post–September 11 rumination, no commentary on Iraq or Afghanistan. "My intention wasn’t meant to be disrespectful. I think I asked 40 questions in that song. ‘Do you ever shave your legs? Did you ever see a stoning?’ It was simple curiosity. I think these are legitimate things that cross your mind when you see somebody with what’s essentially a jail cell over their face."

Johnston debuted Soul Sherpa live at the Lizard Lounge a few weeks ago. His voice was a compelling instrument through the big speakers, especially on "Burka," where his deadpan questions grew pregnant with implication as his gruff tones hung and faded. Years ago, he used tapes for backing so he could perform unencumbered by bandmates; at the Lizard, he used CDs, but each time he was joined by musicians, the energy level and the dynamic interplay kicked the performance up. Dave Champagne, in particular, played beautifully, at times unfurling delay-soaked lines that were akin to the psychedelic blues licks of Pink Floyd’s David Gilmore. Payne also appeared, to take the performance in more improvisational directions. And when Laurie Sargent, drummer Billy Conway, saxist Dana Colley, and bassist Andrew Mazzone joined in, the music had the kind of uplift that the songwriter might hope for from his soul sherpa.

ANOTHER MEMBER OF THE COMMUNITY of artists for whom Cambridge’s Hi-N-Dry studio has become something of an axis is singer/songwriter Catie Curtis, who’s also released a new album. Dreaming in Romance Languages (Vanguard) is her eighth disc and quite possibly her best. The material and the emotional currents run strong, from her confessional "Deliver Me" and the prayerful "St. Lucy" to the love song "Cross over to Me," which she wrote with Beth Nielsen Chapman. Curtis also covers "The Night," which was written by Mark Sandman, the late leader of Morphine, who built Hi-N-Dry. "I’d always felt that song was a conversation between a living person and someone on the other side. Thinking about it further, I realized it could also be what’s running through the head of a person expecting a new life. And actually, when I recorded it, I was expecting my baby to arrive the next day, so it was a really amazing feeling."

Indeed, the entrance of little Lucy into the lives of Catie and her partner Liz may have had an effect on the entire disc, which has more warmth and sonic richness than her earlier recordings. Curtis factors in a few more-practical differences: the playing of former Ani DiFranco band keyboardist Julie Wolf, who is a wiz on Hammond B-3 organ, Fender Rhodes, and other textural instruments not found on her earlier albums, and the dual acoustic guitars of Curtis and former Paula Cole guitar slinger Kevin Barry. Producers Trina Shoemaker, who works with Sheryl Crow, and Tom Dube, a veteran of Richard Thompson sessions, also brought their skills to play.

Barry adds some of his usual sweet electric guitar, too, but this time Curtis also enlisted him in pre-production. They worked out dual parts for her songs that often function as their sonic spines, guiding the rest of the instruments into the core of the arrangements. Although it’s the full-band sound that makes Dreaming in Romance Languages Curtis’s most arresting recording, she’ll be touring — initially at least — without the group, whom she’ll convene for a gig at the Museum of Fine Arts on Bastille Day, July 14.