“Same old, same old” – so goes the refrain on “Pony In The Stable,” one of the dozen tracks on Richard Thompson’s 2015 Still – a sentiment that more or less sums up the artist’s most recent effort to date. Which is to say it’s exactly what we’ve come to expect from Thompson by now: a really great collection of songs, complete with inventive guitar playing, fully drawn character studies of lonely outcasts (“Josephine”), conniving outlaws (“Long John Silver”), and difficult lovers (“All Buttoned Up”), and everything from aesthetic nods to Fairport Convention (“She Could Never Resist A Winding Road”) and explicit references to the Geneva Convention (“No Peace, No End”). In between, there’s the autobiographical tale of Thompson’s time spent in Amsterdam, “Beatnik Walking,” as well as the more overtly political “Dungeons For Eyes.” And Thompson ties everything off with a very funny novelty song called “Guitar Heroes,” about a guy who really likes to play the guitar at the expense of everything else in his life, that has as many shoutouts to the greats as Arthur Conley’s “Sweet Soul Music,” but does it one better by actually playing in the style of each of his idols. It shouldn’t work, but it does, because Richard Thompson is often at his best when he lets himself be silly. For this record, Thompson recruited Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy to produce, and the results are immediate and satisfying, even if neither Tweedy nor Thompson seems particularly inclined to color outside the lines.