“There’s a shade tree near the driveway, porch with a rail / Outside it’s got a lot of what folks call ‘curb appeal’” observes the narrator of “House of Secrets,” the opening track of Mike Ireland and Holler’s alt.country Learning How to Live. What soon becomes apparent is that this cozy facade is just that: a cover for a relationship gone terribly wrong, and the speaker is preparing to set fire to the structure of his old life. He then adds, “This can’t be the only empty house in town.”

Thus is the stage set for Ireland’s confessional exploration of loss and reconciliation, both topics particularly relevant given recent developments in his life. A former member of the Starkweathers, Ireland learned that his wife was having an affair with another band member. Now he’s back with a new band, Holler (Michael Lemon, Paul Lemon, and Dan Mesh), and Learning How to Live, a story of survival.

The album’s thematic universality, those other “empty houses,” is reinforced by its disparate musical styles. For example, four songs on the disc use strings (violin, viola, and cello) and echo 60s and 70s “countrypolitian” associated with George Jones and Charlie Rich. Fans of then-producer Billy Sherrill, Ireland and Holler worked with Marvin Etzioni to create their own lush sound. This elaborate orchestration plays against the honest Appalachian twang of Ireland’s tenor, for just as the music echoes an earlier time, so the speaker cannot leave behind his memories. There are still plenty of twangy numbers on Learning How to Live, with Mesh adding classic honky-tonk riffs while Ireland, Lemon, and Lemon provide the roadhouse rhythms.

The disc is thematically cohesive with all songs told from a first-person perspective, and all but two (“Banks of the Ohio” and “Cry”) written by Ireland. These are stories about loss: What changes is the speaker’s understanding of himself. For the first half of the disc, the narrator is consistently the victim, someone hurt by a lover. In “Headed for a Fall,” he compares love to walking on a fence, with falling off and pain inevitable; “Biggest Torch in Town” follows the cry-in-your-beer tradition. Here the speaker defines himself by the pain of his loss, explaining, “I just spend my time in shadows that I’ve made here.”

But with the middle tracks of Learning How to Live, Ireland explores the other side of the fence when the storytellers finds themselves in positions of power. In “Don’t Call This Love,” the narrator is the adulterer, not the victim, who tells his lover their relationship isn’t love because it’s destructive, ultimately hurting those they do love. With “Banks of the Ohio,” the speaker asserts physical power in a relationship as he kills a lover who refuses to marry him. These shifts, signals of realization and explorations of the politics of cheating, suggest the album’s coming resolution.

Perhaps the highlight of Learning to Live is “Cry,” the penultimate track and Ireland’s version of the 1952 Johnnie Ray hit. The stripped-down song becomes increasingly emotional as the speaker, clearly someone who’s been there, explains that the best way to deal with grief is to “go on and cry.” He then says, “Remember, sunshine can be found / Behind the cloudy sky.” That resolution, or “light,” emerges on “Learning How to Live.”

With “Learning How to Live,” all the album’s emotions come together in an uneasy resolution. The speaker understands he can’t forget how his lover has treated him, but that he must live with what has happened and accept his share of responsibility. Ireland sings, “Won’t forget, can’t forgive / So I’m just learning how to live.” And the strings are back for this song, highlighting the transcendence of the speaker’s insight. It is an epiphanic moment on an unnervingly honest album.