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Everyone struggles with those metaphorical demons.

Some folks spend their entire lives trying to nail shut the door that contains them, putting on airs and giving away mannequin hugs and Kodak smiles trying to pretend everything is OK.

Others, like North Carolina-based singer-songwriter Malcolm Holcombe, rip that door off the hinges, let those haints fly free and exorcise them with an acoustic guitar and a scarred, weathered voice that sounds like the pitted nails of a coyote clacking across backwoods blacktop in the dead of night.

He does it on every record -- his most recent, "For the Mission Baby," is no different. Released in September, it's exactly what his fans have come to expect from Holcombe -- a slurried mixture of grit and grace and Southern witticisms and a few nuggets of eternal truth thrown in for good measure.

But if you ask Holcombe where the songs come from, and he's as puzzled as any other artist who tries to describe the spiritual well from which his or her work springs.

"I can't really explain it -- somewhere between heaven and hell," Holcombe told The Daily Times this week, speaking by phone from his North Carolina hometown. "I guess you'd call it purgatory. It's something that comes as a gift and takes place over time. It's kind of like giving birth to something worth passing along rather than (Jimmy Buffett's) 'Why Don't We Get Drunk and Screw,' which is not my cup of tea.

"Some people are craftsmen -- they can get out a chainsaw and carve a totem pole. Me, I'd just as soon get a chainsaw and cut off my legs, and do it for my own demise. And some people write songs to take a chainsaw to Fort Knox and make a statement. I'd just as soon hang back in the alley, around the streetlight, and count my blessings with my family and neighbors and good friends and fans."

But even that, he added, takes work. He sobered up several years back and makes no secret of his struggles with depression and dependency. While he's had several albums with which to rid himself of those ghosts in the years since, he can never really fully drive them away.

Sometimes it just takes buckling down -- suiting up and showing up, he said.

"You like to eat corn on the cob, you're gonna have to get your hoe out," he said. "If you like tomatoes, you've got to get your hands in the dirt. If you want to write about how good a peanut butter sandwich tastes, you've gotta sink your teeth into the jar."

Most conversations with Holcombe take a similar meandering path. He's a product of his environment -- the mountains of Western North Carolina -- and a conversation with him is filled with off-the-wall analogies, cryptic metaphors and a language that's as foreign as it can be meandering.

Born in Asheville, N.C., and raised in nearby Weaverville, Holcombe learned to play the flat-top guitar and joined up with a folk group called The Hilltoppers. Playing fairs, dances and shows throughout the small town of Weaverville and thereabouts, he weaned himself on folk, traditional Appalachian ballads and bluegrass.

In 1976, he drifted to Florida and in 1990, to Nashville where he worked odd jobs and soaked up as much of the business side of the industry as possible before going back to North Carolina. He's cut several albums over the years, including one for Geffen, "A Hundred Lies," that earned a four-star review from Rolling Stone. He's been compared to Bruce Springsteen for the way he paints vivid portraits with his songs, turning them into haunting, brooding, moving affairs.

"For the Mission Baby" is the latest collection of his artwork. It's classic Holcombe -- dread and melancholy and introspection wafting from songs stacked into a firepit, lit with the liquored breath of a man who spent years at the bottom of a bottle and still fights the demons that dwell within. Holcombe has always been an outsider, but on this album he seems to embrace it more, and there are even a few moments of joy -- as close as Holcombe can come to making a song sound playful, anyway. But for every jaunty "Short Street Blues" or the finger-popping title track, there's the struggle of songs like "A Bigger Plan": "No matter who I am, no one will understand, the same man works to live within a bigger plan ..."

It's the second album he's made with Ray Kennedy, former production partner on Steve Earle's E-Squared label, and it includes a number of guests, including Americana icon Tim O'Brien.

"He's a wonderful player with heart and soul and compassion," Holcombe said. "Just sitting around the kitchen table and listening to his stories, that kind of started the song that kicked off this whole album. From there, you just put some songs together -- get a needle and thread, sew them up and see if you can make a quilt that'll keep you warm and maybe be worth passing along."

If "For The Mission Baby" stands any sort of test of time, he added, isn't for him to say. Like most people, he's his own worst critic, and he doesn't boast about this album or any of his others. The most he'll say about the new record is that it's a road marker pointing to this particular time and place in his life, and given his blessings, it more than likely won't be his last.

"Hopefully it has some levity and longevity in it, but then again, it's not up to me to make that decision," he said. "I'm just trying to go ahead and lay it out there. I just scratch down ideas on a piece of paper, and once in a while, Lord willing, if one has some weight to it, it'll hang around the brain bones a little longer and I'll feel like it's worthy of passing on.

"That's what we do -- we tell tall tales and short tales and just lay them all out there. And any happiness you get from it comes from within. It's a spiritual thing, and misery is optional today. Anything worth doing is worth doing well, and I do know that there's a hoe handle for every hand -- whether it's using it in the field or using it to wave a peace sign."