Jay Farrar, alterna-country’s most stoic figure, found himself standing on emotional ground both familiar and unfamiliar Saturday night. What was familiar was the typically reverential audience that had filled three-quarters of the Paradise to hear Farrar, late of No Depression icons Uncle Tupelo and, most recently, Son Volt. Dropped from Warner Bros. earlier this year (along with ex-Tupelo partner Jeff Tweedy’s Wilco) after three albums in as many years, Farrar has disbanded Son Volt and opted to go solo. Well, sort of. Nearly a dozen musical friends lend a hand on his new Sebastopol (Fellow Guard/Artemis), and on Saturday, he brought along a terrific accompanist who augmented even the singer/songwriter’s most temperate material with bristling lead and eloquently conversational steel guitars, pitch-perfect harmony vocals, and the free-reining sensibility that used to be Farrar’s stock-in-trade.

Aside from some subtle instrumental touches — synth, melodica, tambura — that carry him slightly farther afield of the traditionalist territory he’s roamed in the past, Sebastopol remains an archetypal Jay Farrar (or, for that matter, Son Volt) record. His new songs are still built on modest yet sturdy melodies and a narrow but commanding baritone that becomes a kind of droning instrument when he stretches or flattens his vowels across the sprawl of a verse. At the Paradise, on the second date of his club tour, the assured acoustic-guitar strum and the gravity of Farrar’s voice imbued even the most oblique lyrics ("Pell mell from the committee of welcoming/Taste a different pattern the blind frequency," from the new "Voodoo Candle") with strength and hard-bitten moral authority.

The new material that peppered the 25-song set — from the cautionary opener, "Feedkill Chain," to the lap-steel-flavored "Damn Shame" to the waltz-time "Barstow" — was loaded with familiar Farrar tropes: travel and earth’s elements as personal metaphors for emotional distance, growth, maturity, ambivalence. They fit right in with older mainstays like the Tupelo nugget "Still Be Around" and Son Volt’s "Tear Stained Eye" and "Windfall," both from the band’s landmark 1995 debut, Trace (Warner Bros.). With guitarist Mark Spencer filling in the spaces around him, Farrar also drew liberally from ’98’s underrated Wide Swing Tremolo (Warner Bros.), offering a galvanizing "Driving the View" and a scorching "Straightface" that made the thought of adding bass and drums seem superfluous. When it was over, he simply thanked everybody and left. As usual, he had let his music do the talking.