We kick off the winter season with long-time favorite Chris Smither. The Boston Globe praises Smither as “among the finest acoustic guitarists anywhere in American music.” Since his last visit almost exactly three years ago, Chris has released his 12th album, Leave the Light On.

Some artists continually reinvent themselves; others identify their muse early on and spend their careers single-mindedly pursuing it, remaining recognizably themselves through a career-long process of refinement, growth and discovery. Chris Smither belongs to the latter group. Leave the Light On, Smither’s masterful twelfth album — the first he’s released on his own Mighty Albert label — stands as the quintessence of his life’s work while throwing in some new wrinkles that reflect where he’s been and what he’s encountered since the last time around. But Smither’s central theme as he enters his 60s is clearer than ever. “The last three or four records I’ve done are mostly talking about the big questions — life, death, love and . . . not love — and where the whole thing’s going,” he says. What is immediately recognizable to anyone who has encountered Smither on record or in live performance during the course of the last four decades are his been-there, done-that voice and the crystalline, wordlessly eloquent sounds of his fingerpicked acoustic guitar

After coming on the radar in 1970 with the well-received debut album I’m a Stranger Too! and the similarly lauded 1972 follow-up, Don’t It Drag On, Smither didn’t release another record for more than a decade. “Everybody has good patches and bad patches,” he says. “I was basically drunk for 12 years, and somehow I managed to climb out of it; I don’t know why. Why did I get well when so many other people don’t? It had nothing to do with any virtue on my part; if I were Christian, I’d call it grace. I just got lucky. Mostly you just get tired of it. So when you get sufficiently tired of it, you either descend into utter obliteration or you get out, and so I got out.” When asked about his career-long predilection for mixing in outside songs with his own material, Smither says, “This may sound a little self-important, maybe, but I like to hold these things up and say, ‘These are the people I consider my peers, and my stuff stands up to this. This is what I do, and this is where I come from.’” Do not miss the artist Wired calls “a megawatt solo performer.”

[Smither] taps his foot to keep the rhythm, much like the late blues legend John Lee Hooker. His finger-picked guitar lines are sleek, unhurried and insistent. And then there’s the voice — equal parts gravel and molasses, Smither’s singing sounds like a distillation of the folk and blues heroes he grew up listening to in New Orleans. NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO

Chris Smither's songs seem so casual — everyday language drawled over fine blues fingerpicking and the happy tip-tap of his shoes — that it's easy to overlook how artful and deep they are. Smither is now at the peak of his creative powers. ACOUSTIC GUITAR