Album premiere: Keb' Mo's 'BLUESAmericana'

"I like having definition but not being defined," says Keb' Mo'.

So, for the title of his newest album, he took two related genres of music and pushed them together, coming up with BLUESAmericana, which streams at USA TODAY a week in advance of its official release.

"After all the years of going between genres, I thought Americana seems to be very encompassing, and blues is a part of my experience," says the Nashville-based singer-songwriter, 62. "After coming back from my last record (2011's The Reflection) — which was more a soul record, a slick record — to a more recognizable Keb' Mo, I thought BLUESAmericana was the way to go. It kind of defined a genre for me, carved out a place I want to be in."

Lyrically, though, BLUESAmericana leans heavily on messages of marriage and commitment.

"It's a love record" except for opening track The Worst Is Yet to Come, Mo' says. "There are a lot of love and challenging songs, because that's the way I am with my music. I write about my life, what's going on. I just let it all hang out."

BLUESAmericana is also an album full of secret history. The singer with the low part on Somebody Hurt You, for example, belongs to Ernest "Rip" Patton, Mo's next-door neighbor when he was growing up in Compton, Calif. "I knew him as a jazz drummer, and I was a kid with a new guitar from Sears." Years later, after they reconnected in Nashville, Mo' learned that Patton also was one of the original Freedom Riders, a group that challenged segregated public transportation in the South during the early '60s. "Then I found out he had this great bass singing voice, so I had him come in with three younger guys and sing," Mo' says.

Mo' wrote Do It Right with Jim Weatherly, the writer of Gladys Knight & the Pips classics Midnight Train to Georgia and Neither One of Us (Wants to Be the First to Say Goodbye). The two met one night at Nashville's famed Bluebird Café, then Mo' ran into Weatherly the following day at a restaurant and soon got together to write. "He's got a searchlight in his brain," Mo' says. "He's looking for the artery; he's looking for that thing. When you write a song with him, you don't just come away with a song. You come away with an experience."

Mo' wrote songs for BLUESAmericana with Nashville writers Victoria Shaw (For Better or Worse) and Gary Nicholson (More for Your Money). He also covers Ike Turner's That's Alright, a song he learned from watching a Sam Chatmon video on YouTube. "I wanted something down-home and dirty on it," Mo' says.

BLUESAmericana is the three-time Grammy winner's 12th album, and it marks the 20th anniversary of his recording career. "I recorded my first album in November of '93, and I recorded this one during November 2013," he says.

Mo' says he's far more meticulous with his recording now than he was when he released the self-titled Keb' Mo' in 1994. "A lot of people like things raw," he says. "I don't want raw. I wanted to the record to have some precision to my looseness."