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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 clichés 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 July 15. 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.
Kicking off a brief summer tour at the Mann Center 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.
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