That backstory could easily curdle into shtick — the working man with a guitar, the salt-of-the-earth narrator, all the clichés country music has recycled since before Cash first hit a boxcar in song. But Moule sidesteps the trap by simply not performing authenticity. He just sounds like a bloke who's clocked off a shift and picked up a guitar because the alternative was silence. That distinction matters more than any amount of biography.

Produced by Dave Mann in his home studio — no gloss, no Nashville sheen, no committee of session players smoothing the edges — the track has the loose-limbed, slightly ramshackle feel of two people figuring it out as the tape rolled. You can hear the decisions being made in real time: a chord held a beat too long, a phrase that doesn't quite resolve the way a professional songwriter would resolve it, and somehow all the better for it. Polish is cheap. Nerve is not. Moule and Mann have chosen nerve.

Lyrically, the song plants its flag on well-trodden ground — the tension between keeping your morals intact and climbing the ladder anyway — but it does so without moralising, without a wagging finger, without pretending the choice is easy. Moule isn't interested in scolding anyone who's taken the higher-paid, lower-principled route. He's just telling you what it cost him not to. That plainness is the song's real trick: it never oversells its own sincerity, which paradoxically makes it more convincing than records that shout their integrity from the rooftops.

The Johnny Cash influence is audible rather than borrowed — not the boom-chicka-boom rhythm section, not the baritone growl, but something closer to Cash's instinct for economy, for letting a plain sentence do the work a clever one would only get in the way of. Moule's phrasing has the unhurried confidence of someone who isn't trying to impress you, which is, of course, the most impressive thing a singer can do.

Is it a dance record, as its maker rather charmingly insists? In the loosest sense — the kind of dancing that happens in a kitchen at eleven at night, not on a festival field at three in the afternoon. It has a shuffle to it, a lived-in swing, the sort of groove that invites a swaying shoulder rather than a mosh pit. That's precisely the register country music does best, and precisely the register too many contemporary imitators forget how to hit.

Moule has been threatening this record for years, by his own admission. On the evidence here, the wait was worth it.