One of life’s many paradoxes is that it’s the unattached who are often the most vividly expressive about the search for connection -- and the seemingly rootless who care the most about roots. There’s abundant proof of this in The Drifter, WAYLON PAYNE’s Republic/Universal debut album, a work of deep emotion and authenticity, forged with the most elemental tools of roots rock, blues and hardcore country. “I drift in and out of situations, and I have my entire life,” says the 31-year-old Payne, son of Grammy winner Sammi Smith (“Help Me Make it Through the Night”) and longtime Willie Nelson guitarist Jody Payne; and the godson and namesake of Waylon Jennings. “I’ve never known a place I can call home, never known a place that felt safe to me, other than myself. Now I find great comfort, and great strength and safety in my music. All you have to do is listen to figure out that it’s true.” The music of The Drifter is anything but aimless. Its vignettes play like an unexpectedly gripping first indie film -- rough edges, raw nerves, emotional train wrecks and all, as in the wasted, enraged and obsessive “On and On.” With unvarnished, focused production by accomplished guitarist and songwriter, Keith Gattis, zeroing in on Payne’s intensely personal lyrics, “Her” and “The Bottom” are headlong dives into regret. The haunted, elegiac title track resonates like a war story, and “Running from the Rain” captures a classic sentiment with an unconventional sound. By comparison, “Pretender,” which has already seen early exposure on Los Angeles alternative radio, is a song for the days when one can make peace with the uncertainty of the future. Elsewhere on the album, “Jesus on a Greyhound” (written by Shelby Lynne and Glen Ballard) and “Christian” consider the unquenchable need for a larger truth, wherever it may be found. They, along with the compassionate and tender “Momma Drive On,” address the seeker in all of us. If any album can redeem pop music’s all-too-frequent imbalance between charisma and substance, here it is. Fittingly, Waylon comes to the spotlight not from his native Nashville, but by way of a vibrant Los Angeles scene where the heartland is a pervasive state of mind. A wildly popular monthly night, Eastbound and Down, at the King King Club, was a magnet for musicians playing uncompromising old-school roots music, attracting such luminaries as Lucinda Williams and Dwight Yoakam. A standing rule specifically prohibited the playing of anything but the bonafide classics of Hank Williams, George Jones, Johnny Cash, and the other pillars of true country, whose values and ideals have long vanished from today’s ditty-fied corporate Music Row. By going back to the roots, Payne, producer Gattis, and their cohorts honored the connectedness of blues, country and rock every bit as much as much as their idols did. “I think one of the best things that ever happened to me was getting fired in L.A.,” Waylon laughs, recounting his ejection from Shelby Lynne’s band. “We needed a place to play our music and to socialize with each other. It’s feeling more ‘home’ than any place I’ve ever experienced, because everything there is what a home should be -- there’s love, support, there’s family. Had I stayed in Nashville and tried to do this project, it would have been a disaster. Now people are patting us on the back.” In conversation, Waylon makes constant intuitive connections between a life lived and the music that comes out of it, attesting to the hard-won personal discoveries reflected in his album. Payne says, “My Aunt Yvonne and Uncle Bob raised me in Dallas, Texas, from the time I was about four months old, till I was 17 or 18. Every summer when I was out on tour with my Mama, was the only time we used to hang out. Music’s just always been there for me -- it was the only real thing that I remember. My mama’s record albums, Barbara Mandrell, Willie Nelson, Connie Smith, George Jones, and then there was the Allman Brothers, Lynyrd Skynyrd.” Moving back to Nashville in his twenties and taking up guitar while zonked on painkillers following an accident, Payne says, he started learning the craft of songwriting, as well as its theraputic aspects. “Henry Rollins’ poetry and literature was instrumental to me when I started writing. It was the first time I’d ever read someone expressing exactly how they felt, and apologizing for nothing. I thought that was magnificent…beautiful. We never were big talkers in my family. (But) words are powerful, even though they are invisible: one word can change your life. It’s just in the air, but is it real? Yeah, it’s real.” Eventually, stranded in L.A. and crashing with friends, Payne helped build a close and supportive group of musical idealists. “Gattis went out on a limb and borrowed money from an investor, and put the players together: Rami from the Wallflowers did B-3; Doug Pettibone from Lucinda Williams’ band played some guitar, I played some and Keith played some. Almost all the songs were written in a six-month period. I got really screwed up by a relationship that went bad. So I allowed myself to go back to other times in my life when I hurt that bad. It got me out of it enough to be able to write. I made peace with all of it. When I started writing, the songs just came and they didn’t stop.” With a finished record, and no deal, Payne continues, “I was in New York playing with Willie Nelson and (fellow roots-music artist and now Republic/Universal labelmate) Pat Green said: 'Why don’t you go see Avery Lipman at my label, Universal?' I spent about an hour playing the album and talking about it, and walked out of the building knowing that I was going to be on this label.” In late December, with his advance money, Waylon splurged on a 1964 white Cadillac convertible. For Waylon Payne, The Drifter represents both emotional catharsis and a coming to terms with the things that can’t ever be predicted or pinned down. “As stages of life come along, you find that people come in and out of your life for a reason. I never try to explain that; I just know that it happens. All you have to do is make yourself open and available for them and they will be there. That’s why I have no doubts. This record has already been a major achievement in our lives.”