Nearly a decade after making his presence known on the North Texas blues scene as a teenage guitar prodigy, Dylan Bishop has released a 7-song EP that is an unplugged departure from his Stratocaster-driven live shows.

Frog Song features the 24-year-old’s singing and acoustic guitar playing on seven mostly original songs that harken back to the folk tradition — more Appalachia and British Isles than the electric blues he’s known for playing.

“I had been strumming around on the acoustic more around my house and also starting to write poems,” the Keller native says. “I guess it was in the last three or so years [that] I started to get into some of the other styles of American folk music. The kind of stuff that came out of the mountains. I was starting to listen to a lot of people like Jean Ritchie and a lot of that’s coming from a European influence.”

Bishop says this music discovery led him to stumble “onto a lot of cool, great European singers” such as Ewan MacColl and Dominic Behan.

“And it was totally ringing all my bells because the poems and the stories they tell are always so good and the phonetics and language is so good,” he says. “And then there are these great melodies. I’ve been exploring that stuff over the last couple of years and wanted to try my own hand at it.”

Bishop says he’s getting more confident as a songwriter.

“I always considered myself a guitar player first,” he says. “But lately I’ve been having fun manipulating words in the same way that I feel like I manipulate guitar notes.”

The bluesman adopted a staple of the folk tradition: learning a song and then repurposing it into something new.