The song itself, written five years ago by Zack Kibodeaux of the Texan outfit Blue Water Highway, arrives as the baby of the bunch on an album otherwise stacked with the ghosts of Buddy Holly, Townes Van Zandt and Roy Orbison. That it holds its own in such company says plenty about Kibodeaux's instincts as a writer, and plenty more about Reid's instincts as an interpreter. This is not a man content to simply strum through someone else's good idea and call it a tribute. He goes looking for the song's hidden chambers.

And here is where the record's real masterstroke comes in: the decision to hand production duties to Rohit Bhusan, working out of Mumbai. It would have been the safe move to keep "Alchemist" tethered to its Texan roots — pedal steel, brushed snare, the works. Instead, Reid and Bhusan have built something that feels genuinely transcontinental, a song that seems to have passed through several climates on its way to your speakers. Bhusan's hand is everywhere — keyboards that shimmer rather than simply support, a rhythm section that breathes instead of merely keeping time — and the effect is alchemical in more than just title. Base metal becomes something stranger and more luminous.

Reid's voice, that gravelly, lived-in instrument that has carried four albums of his own songs before this one, turns out to be the ideal vehicle for this kind of sonic reinvention. There's a temptation, when an artist reaches for a more atmospheric, layered production, to lose the human grain underneath it all. Not here. His phrasing stays unhurried, almost conversational, letting the song's melody — and by his own account, melody is non-negotiable for him, the first leg of what he calls songwriting's holy trinity — do the quiet, persuasive work it was built to do.

What's most admirable, really, is the generosity of spirit behind the whole exercise. This is an artist five albums into his own catalogue choosing to step back and shine a light on a writer most listeners won't yet know, treating another man's song with the same care he'd give his own. That's not nothing. Too many cover versions feel like exercises in ego, the original merely a launching pad. "Alchemist" feels like the opposite: a genuine act of curatorship, one craftsman tipping his hat to another and, in doing so, finding something new in the process.

By the time the track resolves, you're left with the sense of having heard two songs at once — the wiry, organic original that lives somewhere in Texas, and this shimmering, well-travelled cousin that Reid and Bhusan have conjured from it. That's a difficult trick to pull off without one version cannibalising the other. They've managed it. File this one under proof that the best covers aren't imitations at all, but conversations — and "Alchemist" is a particularly rich one.