Eric Tingstad goes a little native

You might say Eric Tingstad has gone native.

The Grammy-winning, first-rate fingerstyle guitarist has put aside his pastoral chamber sound for something a little more earthy and rustic, with a Clint Eastwood-spaghetti Western vibe and a nod to American Indian culture.

His new album is aptly called “Southwest.” Tingstad will be showcasing much of “Southwest” during his concert tonight at Edmonds Center for the Arts.

Tingstad also will play some of his most-requested favorites such as “Medicine Tree” and other earlier hits.

Though the album puts the pastoral stuff on pause, “Southwest” is not really a product of Tingstad’s discovering a new musical style, he said, but a direction he had been heading his whole life. The album itself is a project — originally called “the desert project” — he had been compiling on and off for eight years.

“The album was more a natural progression,” Tingstad said in a phone interview from his home on the Sammamish plateau. “I’m from the Pacific Northwest and I’ve always had the woods and rain and weather, and I’m not really a city kid, so I was having those sorts of adventures and we are entrenched in Native American culture here … so I ran with those wolves.”

Tonight’s concert is his first full-ensemble performance of ambient Americana from the Grammy-nominated “Southwest” and his first co-billed appearance with two-time Grammy winner Mary Youngblood, the first American Indian woman to record Native American flute.

Whether a change or a work in progress, “Southwest” is getting good reviews. It’s described on Amazon.com as an album that “ain’t line dances and spilled beer” but has a country sound that is touched with Tingstad’s chamber music aesthetic, but with “just enough trail dust to make it earthy and real.”

Tingstad is known as the harmonic half of the duo Tingstad and Rumbel, for Nancy Rumbel a world premier double reed and ocarina player who provides the melodic balance on such albums as their Grammy winner, “Acoustic Garden.”

Tingstad called “Southwest” a “sub-genre of what Nancy and I were about.”

That sub-genre is certainly Southwestern flavored. “The Last Caballero,” for instance, is reminiscent of the soundtrack to an old Western.

Tingstad said there are three cultures in the Southwest: the Hispanic culture, the American Indian culture and the Western cowboy culture. All those elements are in this album.

Also in “Southwest,” Tingstad said he wanted to give the titles of his songs real meaning, so he selected them carefully. The result is that the songs sound like the titles.

The evocative sounds of “Where the Moon Stood Still” reflect the astronomical phenomenon that happens every 18 years in certain parts of the world where the moon appears to be standing still in the sky. The “Taos Hum” has an ever so slightly electrifying sound to almost mimic the natural phenomenon of the Taos hum, a low-pitched sound heard in numerous places worldwide.

In “Voices of the Ancient Ones,” vocalist Petra Stahl chants in her “native” Swedish. Still, Ting­stad joked, she was from the southwest of Sweden so it wasn’t too much of a stretch from the album’s native-inspired and Southwest themes.