Combine Townes Van Zandt with Joe Ely, and somewhere in the middle, you’ll find Matthew Payne.“He truly is Austin timelessness personified,” says Taylor Wallace-Riegel, KUTX. Texas songwriter and Americana artist Matthew Payne grew up in the beautiful hill country surrounding Dripping Springs, and loved every minute of his two decades as an educator of English and Creative Writing in Austin public schools.If there are two spirit guides to Payne’s debut album, Better Times, it is Red Headed Stranger by Willie Nelson and Nebraska by Bruce Springsteen. Payne’s own songs were recorded similarly, and share the bare-bones stripped-down feel of those classic albums, where both the characters and the music are raw and real. The ten songs that make up the Better Times debut tell stories of conflicted characters at their brink, looking for a way forward, trying to carve it out, trying to make something better, trying to believe that “better times come from these.”