John Mellencamp, "Freedom's Road" (2007)

NICK DERISO: I understand what John Mellencamp was thinking. He options "Our Country" from this album to Chevrolet, knowing that new songs by mid-career guys don't get much airplay these days.

Chevy reruns the thing every time they play football on TV. All of a sudden, Mellencamp has a hit -- "Freedom's Road" peaked at No. 5, selling 56,000 CDs in its first week to become his highest charting release since "Scarecrow" went to No. 2 -- but Mellencamp also has a problem.

While there's plenty of his rural populism here, the tenor of this record has more to do with that earlier smash hit from the fall of '85 than with the commercial's flag-waving jingoism. The marketing screwed up the message.

See, a rangy activism actually threads through "Freedom's Road," which takes a welcome moment to ruminate on the issues of forgiveness and tolerance.

For instance, on this album's best cut, "Someday," Mellencamp references the verse "blessed are the peacemakers" from the Book of Matthew: "Good fortune will come to those who create peace," Mellencamp surmises, "for those are the ones that will walk in heaven ... someday, someday."

Such weighty themes can't be hinted at in between voice overs detailing the Z71 off-road package and GM's patented Vortec V8 engine.

Mellencamp, with his now-familiar passion and accessibility, recognizes that this is a complicated world, and if he doesn't quite solve its mysteries, at least he is honest enough to admit that -- and to give it a try.

He wants to get there by getting along, joining a pitched battle against (among other things) the veiled racism of the post-Jim Crow landscape and the trumped-up reasons for sending young people into faraway conflict: "You can drop your bombs, you can beat the people senseless, that won't get you anywhere," Mellencamp sings on the title track. "Hide your agenda behind public consensus and say that this world just ain't fair. ... You'll never fool us with all your lying and cheating."

He also offers searing political commentary on "Rodeo Clown," a hidden bonus track.

That's not to say that Mellencamp doesn't sometimes struggle to find purchase on the high ground that he's always sought to share with artists like Guthrie, Dylan and Springsteen. Still, he has never sounded more comfortable in relating the uncertainties that exist inside the reliable traditions of middle America.

Too, Mellencamp's garage-band associates display a gritty toughness that lends instant, urgent credibility to the proceedings.

They give his first original songs since 2001's transitional, oddly unaffecting "Cuttin' Heads" a feel more in keeping with Mellencamp's often brutally honest '03 blues tribute "Trouble No More," providing an infrastructure that gives these tunes real heft.

That's best experienced in "Ghost Towns Along the Highway," one of 10 tunes Mellencamp wrote and produced for this album. It has an open, echoing stillness inside an insistent beat that matches this oh-so lonely lyric: "Our love keeps on movin', to the nearest faraway place ..."

"Our Country," in this context, sounds less like an anthem and more like a moment of celebration after a lament -- like that moment when a jazz funeral goes from sad and solemn to resolutely joyous in the face of such grief.

"Small Town" held the same position as part of "Scarecrow" back in the mid-1980s. Both songs, situated as they are on records with larger, darker concerns, crash through their own preconceived notions.

In fact, not much about "Freedom's Road" is what you think it will be. Mellencamp improves upon the musical achievements of earlier triumphs like "Lonesome Jubilee" and "Big Daddy" -- and, to me, bests those two CDs because (as with "Scarecrow") he is willing to be far more emotionally honest with a lyric.

It takes some time to discover that, and he doesn't always completely succeed. But Mellencamp hasn't, in more than two decades, attempted a better record.