Mellencamp at Mann: Past seems present

If you took the word

America

out of the dictionary, John Mellencamp would have to rewrite half his songs.

Reaching back to the halcyon days, and sounds, of 1960s rock-and-roll, Mellencamp's songs evoke the promise of simpler times and the squandered chances of the present. Sketching small-town lives with a storyteller's eye, he pays tribute to people for whom the American dream is making it through another day.

Mellencamp himself has fallen on hard times, relatively speaking. With little hope of knocking Katy Perry off the charts, he's turned to pages from the aging rocker's playbook. His last album,

Freedom's Road

, was a compendium of heartland cliches that seemed designed to win the ears of Wal-Mart shoppers.

Life Death Love and Freedom

comes, for those who subscribe to such dichotomies, from the other side of the culture-war divide; it's being released by Starbucks on Tuesday. Two successive albums with

freedom

in the title might seem like overkill, but

Life Death

is less a repetition than a do-over. Produced by T Bone Burnett, the album's sparse, spooky songs evoke a mythic American past and a dark future.

At the Mann Center on Tuesday night, Mellencamp dwelled mainly on his greatest hits, whose hard-luck stories could have been drawn from the morning's papers. There was no bitterness in "Check It Out" when he sang about having "a brand new house in escrow," just resignation and a touch of knowing irony. Anger came to the forefront with "Rain on the Scarecrow," a furious anthem built on huge, slashing chords about dying family farms.

Mellencamp dismissed most of his six-piece band to showcase two songs from the new album: He played "A Ride Back Home" alone at center stage, and "Don't Need This Body" with only the shimmer of low-register electric guitar added to his acoustic strum. The plucked electric guitar and shuffle beat of "My Sweet Love" evoked the sound of Johnny Cash's Sun Records sides, while "If I Die Sudden" returned to the theme of mortality, albeit with a more upbeat arrangement. Even in death, Mellencamp imagines himself as a rebel. "Please don't call a minister," he sang. "I don't want no one around."

He closed the night with "Authority Song," an iconoclastic anthem he wrote more than three decades ago. The song, he admitted, was "juvenile." But, he added, "I still feel the same way."

Lucinda Williams, who opened the show, is less a rebel than an outlaw. Her songs, which mix country, rock, and deep Southern blues, are sly and seductive one minute, wounded and angry the next. "Come On" assaults an inept (presumably ex-) lover, and "Jailhouse Tears" is a love ballad sung through prison bars.

The highlight of Williams' set was a trilogy of songs about lost souls: "Pineola" and "Drunken Angel," about friends who shot and drank themselves to death, and a new song, "Little Rock Star," about a musician who's threatening to go up in flames. The once-tumultuous Williams has learned in recent years how to burn hot without burning up. It took a while to win over Mellencamp's unfamiliar crowd, but by the end, she had the temperature just right.