The world has never seemed a more frightening place, with daily atrocities creating divisions that seem to take place almost instantly. To check Twitter or watch the events that horrify on the nightly news—race-based shootings in America, acts of terror in France, everything about Donald Trump—is to understand how the whole idea of love thy neighbour is going completely out the window. And, at the same time, one has to wonder if all hope isn’t lost just yet.

Nashville-based Parker Millsap knows what it’s like to grow up distrustful of those who, on the outside at least, don’t appear to have much in common with you. The 23-year-old Americana singer was raised in Guthrie, Oklahoma, a community with its share of Pentacostal Church devotees, his parents among them. If his time in church taught him anything, it’s that lovely people can have some strange ideas.

“I’m from a pretty conservative part of the world in relation to the rest of America,” says Millsap, on the line from the brilliantly named Tokyo Princess in Encino, California. Exhaling, as if choosing words carefully so he doesn’t offend anyone, he then continues with: “I started having a lot of questions about things, but thankfully I had some great teachers, and got some great book recommendations. I started reading Kurt Vonnegut when I was 14, and that was a huge shift in the way that I thought. He could make fun of something but also make you think about the ferocity and the barbaric nature of what he was writing about. And then when I got a car, the radio in Oklahoma was either Top 40 country or Top 40 classic rock or pop, so I started listening to a lot of NPR—their news made me a little more aware of what was going on in the outside world.”

Importantly, that made him want to see the outside world. And he’s done plenty of that since launching a career that’s included three full-lengths, including last year’s widely praised The Very Last Day. When Millsap began touring as a musician, the people he met outside of small-town Oklahoma taught him we’d all be in a better place as a species if we got to know each other.

“When you’re touring you come into contact with every kind of person,” the outgoing singer says. “You’re outside of gigs late at night so you meet a lot of homeless people. You do gigs for people with a lot of money, so you meet a lot of well-to-do people. And you meet other musicians. It’s all been really interesting to me to see how that’s affected my world view.”

And it’s in some ways affected his songwriting, as did the reality of a fire-and-brimstone upbringing. Religion colours the singer’s songs, this evidenced by the roadhouse scorcher “Truck Stop Gospel” from 2014’s Parker Millsap. The Very Last Day’s raw-blues kick-off track “Hades Pleads” proves his fascination with the afterlife doesn’t stop with the Pentacostal church, the lyrics including: “I’m gonna take you to my house on the Styx/On a long black train going clackety-click/I’m begging like Cerberus I’m begging like this.”)  

There’s an argument to be made that Millsap—who sings like he’s made a three-way deal with Elvis, Robert Johnson, and the Devil—isn’t overly optimistic about the future of mankind. The Very Last Day’s “Hands Up” paints a finely detailed picture of an armed-forces vet desperate to feed his family, while the title track riffs on the day a nuclear bomb kills us all with “Watch that mushroom rushing up to space/Gonna sing ‘Amazing Grace’ ”. That’s possibly due to his being obsessed with works like AMC’s The Walking Dead and Stephen King’s The Stand during the album’s creation.

But bleak as the world looks, that doesn’t mean that he’s not trying to make it a better place. One of the album’s most poignant songs is “Heaven Sent”, in which Millsap writes from the perspective of a gay kid wondering why his dogmatically rigid preacher father doesn’t love him. Clearly, he’s moved beyond his upcoming in Guthrie.

“There’s a Kurt Vonnegut quote that I love that goes ‘Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God,’” he says with a laugh. “The nature of my job is I get to meet people in weird places. Like when someones says ‘You got an offer to play Montana,’ I go to Montana.”

Parker Millsap plays the Biltmore on Friday (July 22).