Just about the time John Hiatt came to his senses and came to Nashville, he met the Goners.

''I started putting things together with (the 1983 album) Riding With the King, but I couldn't sustain it because I was still out to lunch in the liquor and drugs department,'' said the now esteemed singer-songwriter. ''Then when I got to Nashville in 1985 is when I started to figure out who . . . I was artistically. And the Goners just fit into that.''

The Goners is a quartet with the rare grit, power and finesse to match Hiatt's own. The 53-year-old Indianapolis native may have been, as he puts it, ''a late bloomer,'' but the years since that mid-'80s blossoming have seen nothing but steady and rapid ascent up the slope of artistic regard.

The Goners - slide guitar wizard Sonny Landreth, drummer Kenneth Blevins and bassist David Ranson - has not been Hiatt's steady band, but more like a collaborator with whom he has toured or recorded when it felt right.

Hiatt has worked with some top-drawer sidemen, including guitar greats Mike Henderson and Ry Cooder and drumming legend Jim Keltner. But the Goners has been behind Hiatt's most extraordinary albums since 1988, including his newest, the gorgeous and driving Beneath This Gruff Exterior. It is the first album that has given the Goners shared billing, and the band is on the road together again.

''We have a language with each other musically,'' Hiatt said. ''We've had this thing. And (with) this record, I feel like we really captured it.''

Hiatt put the Goners together as a touring band to support an album made with a dream team that couldn't be mustered for the road. In addition to Cooder and Keltner, Hiatt's acclaimed Bring the Family included songwriter and singer Nick Lowe on bass.

Hiatt consulted with friend Ray Benson, mastermind of the Texas-based western swing band Asleep at the Wheel. Benson knew exactly how big Cooder's shoes were to fill, but he unhesitatingly recommended Landreth as ''the other slide guitar player.''

Landreth was a Louisiana-raised protégé of the great Clifton Chenier and a solo blues/rock artist with a strikingly original sound. He recruited his Cajun country friends Blevins and Ranson, and the quartet hit the road for what became Hiatt's first really successful club tour. The chemistry lay in the drive and versatility of the players, Hiatt said.

''Louisiana musicians have no sense of boundaries; they learn to play everything, which fit me perfectly because I go all over the place. So it was kind of the perfect little unit for me,'' Hiatt said.

The Goners followed Hiatt into the studio for his next album, Slow Turning, where Landreth contributed stinging and distinctive guitar backing to signature Hiatt songs such as Drive South and Tennessee Plates.

Then, after more than two years, the Goners went separate ways, not out of friction but the desire to keep exploring. A dozen years went by, and then Hiatt called the trio back for a private reunion gig.

''I swear it could have been the week before as opposed to 12 or 13 years,'' said Landreth in an interview earlier this summer. ''It's just a very special chemistry with the four of us that we all appreciate. And that led to a few gigs and the next thing you know, we're in the studio.''

They made 2001's The Tiki Bar Is Open, which was solid and well-received. But Gruff Exterior, with the diner ode How Bad's the Coffee, the haunting Nagging Dark and the motive single My Baby Blue, comes closer to matching the churning energy of the Slow Turning sessions.