John Velghe won’t ask you to cry with him

John Velghe is the kind of rock-and-roller you’d order from the catalog.

He’s lean, with feathery salt-and-pepper hair, sea-glass-green eyes and forearms sleeved in colorful tattoos. He looks tall even when he sits. At 44, he wears frown lines on his forehead and smile creases around his mouth, and wears them well. And when Velghe speaks — about, say, his new album, Organ Donor Blues, out this month — the sound is a low, soothing rumble.

“This is my second solo release, and it’s definitely more deliberate than my last album [2012’s Don’t Let Me Stay],” Velghe says. “It’s trying to tie together things that have gone on in the last 18 months. I tried to be deliberate about documenting some of those things.”

As Velghe sketches out the last year and a half of his life, it’s clear to me why he turned to music to process the events. He has lost three close friends: Dan, whom he had known since high school and who died from complications of alcoholism; Doug, another high school friend, who committed suicide; and Abigail Henderson, co-founder of the Midwest Music Foundation, who died of cancer last August.

“This album is about people who fought to die and won, and people who fought to live and lost, and the people who were left behind,” Velghe tells me. “Abigail was one of those people that fought to live and didn’t win, and meanwhile I had these friends who had everything. Dan had a wife, two kids, a great career, and he fought to kill himself, no matter what we did, no matter how much we tried to keep him alive.”

Velghe continues: “The album retraces those situations, but it’s not so much about those people’s stories. It’s about the people that are left in the wake of that — what do you hold on to, how you come to grips with that and move on.”

What Velghe has found in the wake of these losses is a powerful set of songs. Camouflaged by upbeat ooh-ooh-oohs, swinging trumpet and trombone notes, and joyful sax playing — as well as some deft guitar work by guest star and longtime friend Alejandro Escovedo — half the tracks on Organ Donor Blues could pass for summer-picnic pop. Velghe’s songwriting is so conversational that even as he recounts Dan’s death in “Poison the Well,” he doesn’t pressure the listener to share the burden. Velghe’s point isn’t despair. It’s an attempt at reckoning.

“I haven’t come to grips with a lot of this,” Velghe says, leaning his chin into his palm. “Seeing what happened to Dan, seeing what happened to Abigail, I’d be lying if I said, ‘Oh, I’ve come to grips with these friends that are gone.’ But I remember what Chris Meck [Henderson’s husband] said at Abigail’s remembrance: ‘Find the things you love and don’t let go of them.’ And for me, that’s the people you have around you, the people you realize you’d do anything to keep around. If we hang on to the things we love, that’s really what will get us through.”

So Organ Donor Blues hangs somewhere between mourning (“Maybe I hung on for the wrong reasons,” Velghe says) and celebrating (“This is the stuff that pushes us on”). The closest that Velghe gets to a resolution is on “Beaten by Pretenders,” in which he recognizes that as much as he’d like to keep these people around, the decision isn’t his: If we could write the book, we’d change how it ends.

The rest of the album flies by fast, piloted by Velghe’s granular, Tom Petty–leaning voice. Over the explosive electric riffs on “Gold Guitar,” as he remembers playing with Escovedo and Jon Dee Graham, Velghe sounds as solemn as a distant thunderstorm. The more you listen, the closer he feels. On “Set It Fire,” amid a lonely harmonica and delicate pedal-steel twang, Velghe harmonizes with guest Kirsten Paludan to make a soothing, Midwestern-flavored lullaby.

When people talk about the merits of Americana, a sound that can sometimes feel mail-order anonymous, what they want is the rare thing that Velghe has cultivated: music whose familiarity and honesty pull at your gut instead of just reassuring you. Even the tongue-in-cheek title of Organ Donor Blues — Velghe is an avid motorcyclist — fits this context. And in person, Velghe epitomizes the values heard in his songs. He talks easily about Escovedo’s guidance, which he credits with benefiting him over two decades. And he’s candid about leading a day-job-versus-night-job double life that took a long time to balance.

“It always ends up coming back to the people and the things that I love,” Velghe says, trailing off quietly near the end of our conversation. “I didn’t want to be coy or ambiguous or too clever. There’s a lot more reality that’s occurred in my life that gave birth to this album, and I wanted to keep that.”