Elder statesman Kris Kristofferson grows into his voice.

Johnny Cash once recalled that in the mid-1960s, wife June Carter played him a recording by a singer he'd never heard before. "That man's a poet," he told her. "Pity he can't sing." That remark would be far from the last joke made about Kris Kristofferson's vocal ability, many of them generated by his closest friends. "Let's put it this way," Willie Nelson said a few years back. "It was a damn good thing he could write."

Write he could, of course — deathless songs like "Sunday Mornin' Comin' Down," "Me and Bobby McGee" and "Help Me Make It Through the Night" issued from his pen. (Figuratively: He told me in an interview several months ago that he never writes his songs down. "If it's a good enough song I'm going to remember," he said.) But his singing voice, with its limited range and unpredictable phrasing, was a tougher sell. For all his classic compositions, his only solo radio hits have been 1971's "Loving Her Was Easier" and 1973's "Why Me."

But now it seems clear that Kristofferson's voice wasn't bad, he was just too young to use it. Age has deepened its tone, chiseled cracks and crevices into it, thickened and weathered it. It is the voice of a man who, at 73, is finally suited to use it properly. It's a voice of authority, a voice of reason, a voice of humanity. Note the way producer Don Was recorded that voice on Kristofferson's two most recent albums, 2006's This Old Road and last year's Closer to the Bone: He keeps it always in perfect focus and unadorned by excess instrumentation, glorying in its every imperfect detail. Was produces the voice as if he knows there is no better singer for these songs, no matter how many octaves someone else might be capable of traversing. The recording style reflects Kristofferson's preferred manner of live performance for the last several years — accompanied only by his own guitar and harmonica, encouraging the audience to focus on his songs and, indeed, his voice.

The mature Kristofferson's voice is certainly the ideal instrument to essay the mature Kristofferson's wisdom. His latter-period work could only be that of someone who is, as he often says lately, "at this end of the road." He has reached an age at which many of his contemporaries become frantic about attempting to hide their deepening wrinkles and gray hair, an age at which one can either accept one's maturity or fight a useless battle to remain young. He has chosen acceptance — a path perhaps made easier by the way in which age seems only to have exaggerated his roguish good looks — but a difficult one nonetheless. Acknowledging the inevitable forward march of time means acknowledging one's own mortality; it means looking into the future and seeing oneself absent. Being "at this end of the road" means facing up to the fact that the road ahead, no matter how long it may be, is undoubtedly shorter than the road behind.

Kristofferson has lost several important figures in his life over the last few years, and those losses haunt Closer to the Bone. "Good Morning John" was written in the 1980s about Cash, who passed away in 2003, only a few months after June Carter. Of the Highwaymen, the supergroup Kristofferson formed during that decade with Cash, Nelson and Waylon Jennings (who recorded "Good Morning John" himself in 1985), only he and Nelson remain. Closer is haunted by the spirit of Stephen Bruton, Kristofferson's trusted sideman for four decades, who died of cancer shortly after contributing guitar, mandolin and backing vocals to the recording. (Unfortunately, Bruton's singing on the title cut has been wrongly attributed by some online sources as an uncredited Bob Dylan.) These tragedies — not to mention the intimation of mortality embedded in the grain of Kristofferson's own voice — inform the many moments of openhearted warmth and even joy in songs like "From Here to Forever" and "The Wonder," addressed to Kristofferson's children and wife, respectively.

In a culture so youth-obsessed that beautiful twentysomething starlets regularly disfigure themselves with plastic surgery in a quest for inhuman perfection, we are lucky to have artists like Kristofferson frankly chronicling the view. While it may sometimes be difficult to face the hard truths of aging, Closer to the Bone is also about the ways in which time leads us to a deeper understanding of life's value. In its songs, Kristofferson tells us simple things we might assume we already know: that we should let our loved ones know how we feel about them; that resiliency is worthy of respect; that each new experience is to be savored. But do we feel these things, or only think them? May we all get far enough down the road to know for certain.

Email music@nashvillescene.com.