Nathan Bell has lived life. At 56, the wizened songwriter’s weary voice bleeds experience. He’s seen both sides of the coin—traveled the nomadic, bohemian path of the hard-luck troubadour, and found comfort and meaning in the stability of a family, a home and a near two-decade corporate gig. And now, with a guitar back in his hands where it should be, he’s ready to tell the tale. But it’s not just his own story he’s after. It’s a story of America, of the working classes—both blue and white collar. Bell is a songwriter’s songwriter, a man who has shared bills with legends like Townes Van Zandt, Emmylou Harris, Taj Mahal and Norman Blake. The son of a poet and professor, he has a keen eye for detail, and an unapologetic penchant for the political, populist humanism of his literary heroes John Steinbeck, Jack London, and Studs Terkel. With his latest LP, "Don’t Do This for Love, I Do This for Love" (the third installment in a potent trilogy that began with 2011’s "Black Crow Blue" and continued with 2014’s "Blood Like a River"), Bell has created a song cycle that is both moving and timely. "It’s fairly easy,” Bell says, “to come up with a concept built around working men in the traditional sense—miners and factory workers. But there’s also these white-collar guys who thought there was a rainbow at the end of this thing—that if you worked hard and took care of your family, it paid off. So you gave up things, you made certain sacrifices. But when you really look at it, where’s the payoff? A lot of it is gone. And Donald Trump isn’t bringing it back. He’s not the guy, it’s not the place, it’s not the time. The middle class is getting screwed, just not by the people they think because journalism has gotten so bad. Back in the days of the Soviet Union, when they had no real journalism, it was up to the artists to fill that role, and that’s a big part of what I was trying to do on this record.”