The Salvation Blues is the first solo record in the long career of singer and songwriter Mark Olson, and the genesis of the disc stemmed from a long-standing American tradition: In a low point in his life, Olson hit the road.

Olson, who performs in Providence Tuesday, first rose to prominence with the alt-country pioneers The Jayhawks, bringing together a contemporary indie-rock approach with an exuberant yet plainspoken country lyricism. After The Jayhawks broke up in 1995, Olson married singer-songwriter Victoria Williams and, with her, started the “y’allternative” roots-music collaborative The Creekdippers.

In 2005, he broke up with Williams, and The Creekdippers dissolved as well. That left Olson with nothing to do and no one to be with.

“I took certain things in life for granted, and those things were friends, family, a job, a purpose, things like that,” Olson says now. “Life is very strange, and not that pleasant, without all those things. I kind of had to start over with each and every one of them.”

By January 2006, Olson was heading to Cardiff, Wales, hoping some time out of his usual element would get his head together.

He stayed with novelists Charlotte Grieg and John Williams, and all three would spend evenings talking, drinking and hanging out at the Chapter Arts Center. But he noticed that the next morning, “They’d pop up at 7 and work until 5 every day. I decided, ‘Yup, I’m going to pop up too.’ . . .

“When you first start out, there’s a lot of time. When you get older, your life fills up with stuff — responsibilities. But once that went a different way for me, and I ended up over there, I had the time again to write.”

That’s how The Salvation Blues was born. He wrote the first two songs on the record, “My Carol” and “Clifton Bridge,” in Cardiff.

He continued on to places such as Oslo, Norway, Krakow, Poland, and Minneapolis, and made several stopovers at his aunt’s house in Colorado, writing songs and recording demos along the way for later use. (One of those demos, the emotionally fraught “One Book Philosophy,” appears on the record in its Oslo demo form, with Olson singing and playing organ on his own.)

The result is a disc of songs that are personal without being sappy, and literate without being wordy, about the traumas that life can inflict (“Where’s my home? How could I lose this in a day?” goes “The National Express”; “See how much this tree has grown,” Olson sings to the suicide who is the subject of “Keith”) and, sometimes, the peaceful, undramatic determination to go on (“Some people come here to die/ We Came here to live,” goes “Clifton Bridge”). And all with the light touches of twangy electric guitars, chirping pedal steel and chiming piano that are Olson’s stock in trade.

The Jayhawks started 20 years ago, so that’s a long time to wait for a first solo record. But Olson says there wasn’t any psychological drama behind his decision to work alone — it was more of a career-oriented move: His bands were better-known than he was, and if he was going to be the name on the marquee he needed to be the name on the CD cover.

“If I was going to continue playing music, I was going to have to be able to tour under my own name, so I had to make the record with my name on it. Because I put a lot of time and energy into the Jayhawks and The Creekdippers, and I came out of it without really [a lot].”

He had done a little bit of European solo touring, “but nothing that was going to see me through the next year. It was more of a survival thing. I had to try to make a record on my own.”

He’s not totally alone on this tour. He’s got two accompanists from the record — violinist Michele Gazich and singer and multi-instrumentalist Ingunn Ringvold, who plays piano, African drum and more. They can travel in one van, or in Europe, where pianos are usually provided at venues, they can hop a train. “You have to be able to figure it out these days, to travel light,” Olsen says.

The Salvation Blues also has a guest appearance from Jayhawks co-songwriter Gary Louris. Olson adds that the two are going to put out a record this fall, which he describes as sounding much like The Jayhawks, but with an acoustic half: Two guitars and “sing sing sing, play play play. It’s the way we wrote the songs in the first place.”

But in the meantime he’s on the road, singing the songs he wrote on the road and thankful for the opportunities that his travels gave him.

“I really enjoyed the talking I did over there” in Europe, Olson says. No offense to his native Minnesota, but “I know every accent, every meaning of every word. . . . Different places kind of open me up better.”

And the routine helps him as it did during his two years of wandering.

“I hadn’t been writing prior to that, because my mind had been focused on trying to solve everything all at once, and that didn’t work. . . .

“The more I talked about it and thought about it, the less I actually did it. I was looking for this one magical thing that would make everything work out, and it didn’t really work that way. How it happened was doing what I had always done, which was songwriting, playing the guitar and meeting people and trying to record songs and do gigs and put a band together. I feel like I’m at a certain level, and when I go do other things, I’m not quite on the same level. It’s my purpose in a way; it’s what I do.”

Mark Olson is at the Hi-Hat, 3 Davol Square, Providence, Tuesday at 7 p.m. Admission is $15; call (401) 453-6500.

rmassimo@projo.com