On Quinn Christopherson's debut album, stories of growth emerge in monumental details

For Quinn Christopherson, storytelling is something of a family affair. The musician, who grew up in Anchorage, Alaska, attributes his knack for it to his heritage: His mother is Ahtna Athabascan and his father is Iñupiat, and Christopherson says telling stories is central to his family's traditions. He started writing a lot of poems as a kid; at 20, his dad bought him a guitar and he began writing songs. But really, he says, he traces it back to his grandmother. "My grandma would tell us stories, and sometimes they would be so short," he once said in an interview. "She would almost say nothing, but we got a whole world view out of, like, five words."

The first song I ever heard of Christopherson's was, in fact, a tribute to his grandmother: "," a, his debut album, collections of charming details — childhood friends, hole-in-the-wall bars, a father-daughter bowling league — thread together to reveal moving, complicated stories of growth, pain and possibility.