Steve Azar is a proud native of blues-saturated Mississippi, and while there aren't many overt blues elements coloring his relatively straight forward country music sound, it's still hard not to miss traces of what you might call a blues attitude influencing the attitudes and actions of his song characters.

Tracks on his new Mercury album, "Waitin' On Joe" (his first release since a 1996 album on River North), are loosely linked by an underlying thin current of hope, but none of these songs will ever be mistaken for anything like Walt Disney's patented 'happily ever after' stories. If the blues has taught us anything at all, it's that happiness is a welcome exception, but painful sadness is the expected rule.

The album's title track is a perfect example. It begins innocently as the story about a guy who couldn't be on time for an appointment if his very life depended upon it, but ends with this same guy, Joe, getting crushed to death while trying to beat a train across the tracks.

While trains have always acted as handy lyrical metaphors for country songs (and for many other kinds of songs, for that matter), they usually represent positive motion - like a means of escape from some troubling circumstance. Other times, they're the vehicles that steal a loved one away. But in Azar's skeptical imagination, this particular locomotive stands for an entirely more menacing representation.

"As I started writing it, I started thinking about what I wanted to do with my life and what that 'one thing' was," comments Azar, 38. "I started paying attention to a lot of friends of mine, and they were all working toward goals. The train represents the chance that something's going to come along and kill your dream and kill what you want to do. The song - to me - meant what I wanted to do with my life, and how an opportunity might possibly be missed after all the work I've put into it. I think we can all kind of relate to that on some level."

This dark train stands for the unexpected tragedies that visit all lives at one time or another.

But without these dramatic touches, no life story would be truly complete, and without them, no person would be truly human. Through his songs, Azar tries to express the ebb and flow of real human life, both good and bad.

"This album doesn't have any happy endings," Azar admits. "It's the process of life. I can say that honestly, because I feel like - now for the first time - I've actually stepped into real life in the last four or five years and because I've had to see it for what it is. Life is a process, and it's a process of wanting and needing and yearning, and there's really no finish line until it's over. I think this album represents a lot of that."

The hopeful side of this release is best summed up by the song "The Underdog." Its words speak about keeping hope alive - even in the face of dire situations. Life's troubles can beat you up, it seems to suggest, but they can never knock you completely out.

So they say I'm not that strong
And the odds are way too long
Well, I was born to prove them wrong
I'm the underdog

"I think we're all underdogs to somebody, somewhere," Azar explains. "There's never a time in our lives where we're not going to be an underdog to somebody. I grew up a huge fan of movies like 'Hoosiers,' 'Rudy' and all these movies about sporting teams that have no chance on paper. They're 1/15 the size of their opponents; they've got no big scholarship players, and yet they still have a chance to win. And you go, 'Wow, how did that happen?' You can't help but pull for them. And everybody in life is the same way, at times."

Anybody who has had to struggle and fight to make it in the music business can relate to the underdog's plight. Azar also knows this uphill battle well, because he's never quite fit into the mainstream industry's sometimes rigid expectations.

"I know, whether good or bad, I don't sound like anybody else," Azar pronounces. "I know I don't write quite like anybody else because I'm really wordy. You come here (to Nashville), and everybody's saying 'less is better.' But for me, it wasn't the thing. Also, I come from the Mississippi Delta, and that flavor is just injected in every song in some way or another. It's just who I am, and it's real. You can't just find any old song and have me sing it. I think it has to come out of me or be a part of me."

Azar always knew he was a little different from everybody else, which is why it was at the urging of Jim Gallagher Jr., a professional golfer, that he finally decided to make the jump to Nashville in 1993, instead of moving to Music City based upon expert advise from somebody in the music business.

His debut album's title, "Heartbreak Town," proved to be a prophetic one since his label shut down shortly before his album was released. But like all true underdogs, Azar seems to thrive on such adversity, and these career trials only made him work harder at improving his craft.

So it should comes as no real surprise that his single "I Don't Have to Be Me ('Til Monday)," has been an out-of-the box hit, as there was an immeasurable amount of emotional elbow grease that went into its preparation.

Azar didn't have what you might characterize as a typical Southern upbringing growing up. In a land loosely divided between whiskey-drinking heathens and strict Baptists and Pentecostals, his father was the non-drinking owner of Mississippi's first ever liquor store, and both parents were dedicated Catholic church-goers. In fact, some of Azar's first songs were written for the youth group at his church.

"One of the guys that kind of ran the whole thing (at church) said, 'I want you to start doing some of your songs for meditation,'" Azar recalls. "And at the time, I was really just writing songs about real life. It kind of got me going and writing songs and playing them for people at a really young age."

Song writing, as with most kinds of writing, is a lifelong learning process. Azar, the fourth of five children - he has two brothers and two sisters - may have discovered his knack for the talent at a young age, but he's still learning this craft - even now as an established musician.

"I'm definitely at the point in ' my life - for the last five, six, seven years or so - that I feel like, when I put it down, it makes more sense in the scheme of things. And it's saying what I want it to say, and every 'if, and and but' feels right," Azar says proudly.

While Azar has been delighted with this evolutionary process as an artist, it took finding a producer who also recognized these growth traits to help him jumpstart this latest. These days, Azar has nothing but the highest regard for his new producer, Rafe Van Hoy.

"I had to find a Rafe Van Hoy in my life to say, "I love it, let's don't change it." And that's exactly what he told me one day."

Azar first met Van Hoy when they were teamed up together for a writing session. They hit it off right away, and this led to their newfound recording partnership.

"We wrote "You Don't Know How It Feels," which is the first one we recorded, and we recorded it that very night. And he (Van Hoy) said, 'I love it. Let's don't change what you do.' I'd never heard myself sound like that on tape. He just knew who I was. Immediately, we started writing and working together."

Azar is equally pleased with his record label, which he says is allowing him the opportunity to express his unique individuality through music.

"Mercury allows you to do that, whether your personality is good or bad," he says with a chuckle. "Whether mine is good or bad, they're (at least) giving me a chance to be able to show that in music. So that's amazing to me."

Nashville would do well to better support some of its unique artists, give them the chance to be themselves. In the past, such a big umbrella approach has given us some of our most talented stars.

"When I came to town, it was Vince Gill, and it was Dwight Yoakam, and it was Garth, and it was Clint Black, and it was Marty Stuart, and it was Travis Tritt. It was all these acts. And then it was the girls: and it was Pam Tillis, and it was Trisha, and Kathy Mattea. And the point was, everybody was unique. Everybody was at least different sounding in that way."

But it will take more than just unique voices and musical approaches to restore country music's tainted artistic credibility. It will also require songs that speak to people's lives. And these musical expressions don't always have to be love songs.

"I really believe that we got away from real songs about real life, and I think country music has (in the past) been more about life than anything else," Azar states. "We're all in life, but we're not always in love all the time. If love has something to do with it, great. But we need to hear about what's going on in our lives, and I think country always portrayed that and always spoke that with a really loud voice. But I really believe that (reality) is going to make its way back (into country music) again."

"(When) people come out there to see a show, I don't think they necessarily want to hear about how my hair was blowing in the wind all night. They want to hear about what was wrong with my hair. They want to know what happened to me today, and why I felt that way. And trust me, there are a lot more bad hair days than good hair days, if you counted them all up."