To begin to understand singer-songwriter John Moreland, you have to start with the hands that write his songs. They, like him, are significant, the outsized endpoints of a very large man. But the fingers are slender and lithe, capable of moving quickly over the strings of an acoustic guitar. Find the “O” on his right pinky, the portal to the colorful rivers of ink that roll up his arms, the start of the musician’s first-ever tattoo: “OKLAHOMA,” one letter on each of his eight fingers, ending just after the wedding band on his left ring finger. His last three albums—2013's In the Throes, 2015's High on Tulsa Heat, and this spring's Big Bad Luv—are a trilogy that largely explore the life and questions between those two boundaries, the state he moved to when he was 10 and the person he lives with there now. It’s the story of John Moreland (so far), written on John Moreland.

And how does it go, this story?

“The whole thing, I guess, is a search for belonging,” he says on a gray June afternoon, the day before he’ll headline New York’s Bowery Ballroom. His wife, Pearl, is with him. He’s wearing a baggy black shirt, dark pants rolled at the ankle, and squeaky-clean white and black Nike Cortez’s. His head is mostly bald, revealing a new, still-scabbed tattoo of a flower over his right ear. His dark eyes are framed by the lenses of some Ray-Ban glasses. He is soft-spoken, his voice gentler in conversation than the barreling train it becomes in song.

“In the Throes was dealing with stuff from adolescence. It’s making sense of all that. I’ve got this baggage from when I was younger and now I'm an adult—where do I fit into the real world? All this stuff I’m carrying—where does that fit? What do I do with it?" he muses. "High on Tulsa Heat was kind of examining the idea of home. It’s the same thing as belonging. You’re trying to find that belonging in a place or an idea or whatever home is. And [on Big Bad Luv], I’ve found the belonging.”

Moreland cites influences like Gillian Welch, Tom Petty, Steve Earle, and Townes Van Zandt, but toured with hardcore punk bands in high school. He's a punk-rock spirit telling folk stories, run through a smoky, bourbon-soaked lilt, the production filter that is Basement Bar in Middle America. He spent some time opening for Jason Isbell, and that might be an apt songwriting comparison, his evocative, metaphorical lyrics the threads by which he weaves pithy, soul-rattling narrative tapestries. From “No Glory in Regret,” for example: Did you hear the devil laughing / From the ambulance passing?/ Or was that just my troubled mind? / Don’t you wanna shake the ground / And tear heaven down? / And raise your fist to the guilty sky? / Well, I’ve been pouring whiskey in the wind / Burning pictures of my best friends / Until the ashes cover me like rain.

On In the Throes' “I Need You to Tell Me Who I Am,” Moreland sings, I was born with a bomb inside my gut. Go to a show—or, until you can, watch one of his highest profile gigs to date, a slot on Colbert's The Late Show in early 2016—and you’ll get a sense of what it’s like to be in the blast zone when it explodes out of him. It’ll make you wonder how much longer a man like John Moreland can stay in the shade of his relative non-celebrity. It’s like reading a novel you feel like has been written for you, when you find a home and sense of belonging inside the words of someone searching for his own.