Still the same, only older and better: Songwriter John Hiatt returns to Lexington

On the cover of his 2008 album “Same Old Man,” John Hiatt is seen leaning against a car at dusk, staring at a skyline purposely devoid of metropolitan detail. Thank the strategically positioned silhouette of a water tower for that. His wardrobe: yellow dress shirt, blue tie, spectacles and a distinctly chiseled frown. He looks less like one of the country’s most championed songwriters and more like a hip, rural hitman.

Inside, however, as the music pours out, the true Hiatt emerges. The album’s title tune is a love song – not the kind that promotes the youthful abandon that, even then, was long in his rearview mirror. This is instead a love song for another age, Hiatt’s age (56 at the time; he turns 70 next week). It expresses gratitude over desire, confession over intimacy and cunning over innocence.

“Oh, I’m the biggest baby in the world,” Hiatt sings in a playful growl. “I know you can say a lot about that. You’re so sweet, you keep it under your hat.”

For nearly a half century, the sometimes dark, often whimsical and always worldly humanism of Hiatt’s songs have been covered by legions of artists from remarkably disparate camps. A short list of those who have colored their careers with his music: Bob Dylan, B.B. King, Linda Ronstadt, Emmylou Harris, Buddy Guy, Eric Clapton, Keith Urban, Willie Nelson, Iggy Pop, Jimmy Buffett and a few dozen others.

One of his works, a rootsy romantic diversion called “Thing Called Love” (which taps into a vastly sunnier sense of expression than the wilier “Same Old Man”) was recorded by Bonnie Raitt in 1989, triggering a mid-career commercial renaissance that transformed her into a pop celebrity. True to playful Hiatt form, the song famously rhymed “Queen of Sheeba” with “amoeba.”

But nothing quite beats the sound of Hiatt performing his own songs, as he will be the case when he returns to Lexington for an Aug. 14 performance at the Opera House. Similarly, in viewing his own critical and commercial breakthrough, there is no better way to experience Hiatt in concert than with the band that will back him this weekend.

Though he has played numerous Lexington venues through the years – from clubs to theatres to outdoor festivals – this will be his first local show with The Goners, the no-frills, roots-driven combo led by Louisiana blues, zydeco and Americana guitarist Sonny Landreth.

How important have Landreth and The Goners been to Hiatt’s career? To understand that fully, you need to flash back to 1987 and Hiatt’s brilliant “Bring the Family” album. That was the record that led Hiatt out the shadows of a wildly turbulent life that included the suicides of his brother and second wife as well as a decades-long battle with alcohol and drug abuse. Embracing a faith fueled by domestic stability (he married his third and current wife Nancy in 1986), “Bring the Family” broke the songwriter through, after numerous major label attempts, to critical and, to a more modest degree, commercial acclaim. It also brought the hard-earned, earthy romanticism of Hiatt’s music to a zenith with an all-star band that featured guitarist (and one-time boss) Ry Cooder, bassist/veteran pop stylist Nick Lowe and drummer/heralded session ace Jim Keltner.

While the record essentially rescued Hiatt’s career from oblivion, the band was simply too high profile to hold together for a follow-up record (although the four did reunite briefly in 1991 under the ensemble banner of Little Village). That’s where The Goners stepped in.

With Landreth, bassist David Ranson and drummer Kenneth Blevins, Hiatt cut a follow-up album, “Slow Turning,” in 1988. While it followed the same no-frills electric expression of “Bring the Family,” the newer record’s mood was more mischievous and his musical accent distinctly more Southern, the latter an attribute to Landreth’s roots-savvy runs on slide guitar.

Again, it was the artists who soon interpreted the tunes of “Slow Turning” that made the biggest noise. Blues giant Buddy Guy cut the reflective “Feels Like Rain,” the giddy outlaw romp “Tennessee Plates” became a centerpiece tune in the hit movie “Thelma & Louise” and the then-popular Nashville star Suzy Bogguss had a No. 2 country hit with the breezy getaway celebration “Drive South.” But the show stealer would eventually be Emmylou Harris, who years later transformed the brilliant Hiatt saga of romantic isolation “Icy Blue Heart” into a gorgeous, genre-defying meditation of heartbreak.

Hiatt would return through the ensuing decades to record and tour with The Goners, but none of the reunions yielded a Lexington concert. That’s remarkable considering how often the songwriter has played here. For his first outing, at the long-since demolished Main Street location of Breeding’s in 1990, Hiatt’s band was a more expansive sounding rock troupe called The Fugitive Popes. Then came a 1994 headlining performance for Memorial Stakes Day at the Red Mile (which will return to life as a music haven next summer as the new home for Railbird) with a leaner sounding tribe dubbed The Guilty Dogs.

Portions of the latter concert have been preserved for posterity. Specifically, spirited performances of “Memphis in the Meantime” (originally from “Bring the Family”) and “Paper Thin” (the most overtly rockish entry on “Slow Turning”) from the Red Mile show became part of Hiatt’s 1995 concert album, “Hiatt Comes Alive at Budokan.” The title was a playful nod to popular ’70s era live records by Peter Frampton and Cheap Trick.

Most of Hiatt’s other visits to Lexington have been as a solo acoustic artist. So how does all this figure into this weekend’s concert, a show that serves as both a return and a debut?

For starters, that means a setlist that will likely draw heavily from “Bring the Family” and “Slow Turning.” It’s hard to complain about that blend, save for the fact that Hiatt has since recorded scores of remarkable albums that have largely been forgotten, even by the artist himself. A string of consistently strong recordings for the New West label hit a wiry, bluesy peak with 2014’s “Terms of My Surrender” and again in 2021 by way of a spacious, drummer-less turn with dobro great (and one-time Lexingtonian) Jerry Douglas titled “Leftover Feelings.”

What matters most, though, is Hiatt will be back in Lexington to offer songs of personal rebirth, playful introspection and stark human reality with the finest touring band of his long career by his side. In the finest way imaginable, it will more of the “same old” from the “Same Old Man.”

“You know, I kind of signed up with the idea that writers are supposed to write about what they know,” Hiatt told me in an interview before a 2009 concert with Lyle Lovett at the Norton Center for the Arts in Danville. “Not that I know any damn thing about love. But I came from a place of such despair back when I was an addict and alcoholic. I was freakin’ out of my mind. To come from that into putting a family together with a woman who cared for me and who I cared for ... it is a continual source of inspiration. And so that just seems to be what I’ve decided to write about.”

John Hiatt and The Goners featuring Sonny Landreth

When: 8 p.m. Aug 14

Where: Lexington Opera House, 401 W. Short.

Tickets: $45-$65 through ticketmaster.com.