If 2017 has been a roller-coaster, or even an annus horribilis, for some of you, here's wishing 2018 would signal a turn-around of fate and circumstance.

And what's better than to start the year on a genial note with Jim James' wondrous voice?

His latest is a covers album that comes seemingly from nowhere, like a shooting star in the middle of the night or a brief spell of magic.

Tribute To 2 isn't showy, comparatively more stripped-down than his work as a frontman of the Kentucky cosmic rockers My Morning Jacket.

A palate cleanser, it is a follow-up to Tribute To, a covers EP of George Harrison songs, which in itself was an utterly personal quirk, recorded days after The Beatle's passing in December 2001.

It feels opportune in a current climate of polarising factions, especially coming after his previous solo outing, Eternally Even (2016), his most explicit response to post-election America.

The latest covers album is a trans-Atlantic sojourn through genre and time, lobbying for hope and empathy when the tendency is to divide.

James addresses this in The World Is Falling Down, originally sung in 1991 by African-American jazz singer and civil rights advocate Abbey Lincoln.

"There are some folks I used to know/Who used to smile and say hello/And spin the world and turn the page," he sings with a tinge of wistfulness, voice reverberating through space as the guitar strums.

This is echoed by a telling opener, I Just Wasn't Made For These Times, the Beach Boys classic from 1966's Pet Sounds, which James turns into a psychedelic soul ballad, an inter-generation dialogue between misfits.

"I keep looking for a place to fit/Where I can speak my mind/I've been trying hard to find the people/That I won't leave behind," he sings, as the strings swell over a sample of Isaac Hayes' 166 version of Jimmy Webb's By The Time I Get To Phoenix.

He achieves another subtle subversion in his version of Sonny & Cher's Baby Don't Go, taking on both male and female parts, a move resonant in these post-Harvey Weinstein times when gender expectations are being probed and redefined.

Even when times are bad, he seeks communion in a honky-tonk version of Bob Dylan's I'll Be Your Baby Tonight, a stripped-down revision of Emerson, Lake & Palmer's prog-rock doozie Lucky Man, and a bewitching, gypsy-jazz take on the Irvin Berlin's standard Blue Skies.

As usual, it's his gravity-defying tenor that lends the proceedings an air of alien wonder.

Crying In The Chapel, a doo-wop 1950s classic variously covered by Elvis Presley and the Orioles, is transformed into a private confession in a cavern.

It's poignant precisely because it sounds hopeful. Such is the beautiful, bountiful heart of Jim James.