Kevin Brown tells story on latest CD

Flipping through the liner notes of local singer-songwriter Kevin Brown’s newest album is like flipping through a small storybook: The songs are listed like chapters and the lyrics written out like rhyming fables, accompanied by some whimsical illustrations.

That design is in keeping with the lyrical themes of the record, titled “Book of Skies,” Brown’s third release as a solo artist. Like a book, the album has been structured to be listened to from beginning to end, and tonight’s CD release show will feature Brown and his backing band performing it in sequence.

“This started to feel like a ’70s album to me,” Brown said. “I grew up on Jackson Browne and Neil Young, and I shifted up into that ’70s album sound this time around. It may be a dying art form, but I believe in it and it’s been such a huge part of my life.”

Brown didn’t start playing music until later in his adult life, with his first solo album, “The County Primaries,” coming out when he was 48. He plays mandolin in the long-running bluegrass group Big Red Barn, but there are only hints of bluegrass in the music on “Book of Skies”: You can hear some elements of folk, country, soft rock, honky tonk and maybe a little blues.

The album took about a year and a half to complete, and Brown said he had to have patience in getting the songs to come about naturally.

“The very first song (on the album) was actually the last one to be written,” he said. “I had all the other songs, and I felt like I was missing my opening track. … But I had this trust that I don’t think would have been there in the previous two albums that it was going to come. And it did, and that kind of songwriting doesn’t happen to me very often.”

That song, “The Empty Page,” includes themes that ripple throughout the record – Brown touches on the process of writing (“I push my pen across the empty page / Pirouettes on a paper stage”), conjures up images of the sky (“I watch the geese flying o’er the frozen farms”), provides painterly descriptions of landscapes and nature (“The sun comes up / The homestead beams / I brush the watercolors from my dreams”).

“It’s like watching this thing fit together in little bits and pieces, a song here, a verse here,” Brown said of his writing process. “By the time the whole thing was done, I felt like there was some lyrical and musical continuity to it.”

As the album progresses, there are longing ballads, playful goof-arounds and even an epic biblical fable (“Then Came the Wind”). But the record ties itself together with a closing track, appropriately called “The Last Page,” that picks up musical themes from the previous tracks and weaves them into an instrumental coda.

Most of the local musicians who appear on “Book of Skies” – including Eugene Jablonsky on bass, Dru Heller on drums, Duane Becker on pedal steel and Jenny Anne Mannan on fiddle – will also be performing with Brown tonight. Brown describes his collaborations as fruitful and inspiring, but he also says it’s refreshing to be, as he calls it, the driver of the semi.

“With Big Red Barn, it’s like being on the same camping trip with your buddies for 12 years,” he said. “But there’s a decision-making process that happens. So it was fun to just say, ‘I’m driving this thing.’ And that’s not to say that people didn’t contribute ideas, because every musician that came in raised the bar.”