There are artists who come through Lubbock because it happens to be the next city on the tour.

Terry Allen coming to Lubbock is different.

The songwriter, visual artist and storyteller was raised here, and few artists have spent more time turning the landscape, people, humor and contradictions of West Texas into art.

This week, Allen returns for two very different evenings at Texas Tech University — and together they offer something closer to a homecoming than an ordinary pair of performances.

Thursday night, October 22, brings Truckload of Art to Maedgen Theatre.

Doors open at 6:30 p.m., with the program beginning at 7 p.m.

Rather than a conventional concert, the evening mixes music, stories, spoken word and conversation.

Allen will be joined by Jo Harvey Allen, Bukka Allen and Richard Bowden, with biographer Brendan Greaves participating in the evening.

It is an especially appropriate format for an artist whose career has never stayed neatly inside one category.

Songs lead into stories, stories become visual art, and West Texas characters turn into something halfway between memory and mythology.

Then Friday night changes gears.

Memwars, beginning at 7 p.m. at the Allen Theatre, brings Terry and Jo Harvey Allen together with the full Panhandle Mystery Band.

The lineup includes Charlie Sexton, Richard Bowden, Bale Allen, Bukka Allen, Lloyd Maines and Davis McLarty.

For Lubbock music followers, Maines’ presence adds another layer to the evening.

The Grammy-winning producer, steel guitarist and multi-instrumentalist is deeply rooted in Lubbock and West Texas music and has been part of Allen’s musical world for decades.

Maines helped shape recordings central to Allen’s catalog while building an extraordinary career of his own as a producer, session musician and member of the Maines Brothers Band.

But Friday is not simply a gathering of notable musicians.

The title Memwars gets closer to what the evening promises: songs and stories accumulated across decades of friendships, performances and creative collaborations.

That is precisely why these two nights matter here.

Allen’s relationship with Lubbock has always been complicated enough to be interesting.

His landmark album Lubbock (on everything) did not turn the city into a postcard.

Instead, it captured something much harder to describe — the flatness and distance, the characters and contradictions, the feeling of wanting to leave a place while discovering that the place never entirely leaves you.

Over the years, that perspective helped make Allen one of the artists most closely associated with the particular creative streak that has repeatedly emerged from Lubbock and the South Plains.

Buddy Holly is the famous beginning of that story, but he was hardly the end of it.

Joe Ely, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Butch Hancock, Lloyd Maines and others helped build a West Texas musical tradition that has always been a little too restless to fit comfortably into a single genre.

Terry Allen belongs squarely in that tradition while somehow remaining unlike anyone else in it.

That makes these performances more than another pair of dates on Lubbock’s entertainment calendar.

Thursday offers a chance to hear Allen talk about the art, people and experiences behind the work.

Friday puts much of that history back onstage with the musicians who helped create it.

For longtime followers, it is a rare opportunity to see those threads pulled together in Lubbock.

For people who know Terry Allen mainly by reputation — or perhaps only by the title Lubbock (on everything) — this may be an unusually good introduction.

Tickets for both Texas Tech Presidential Lecture & Performance Series events are available through Texas Tech’s ticketing system and AXS.

Doors open at 6:30 p.m. both evenings, with performances beginning at 7 p.m.

Thursday, Oct. 22: Truckload of Art — Maedgen Theatre.

Friday, Oct. 23: Memwars with the Panhandle Mystery Band — Allen Theatre.

For Lubbock music fans, the real choice may not be which night to attend.

It may be whether to make it both.