John Mellencamp “Life Death Love and Freedom” (Hear Music, •) As the title indicates, this is John Mellencamp at his most serious. Not to mention his most forlorn: “Life is an abstraction, and it tries to fool us all, and it’s working so far, it seems,” the normally feisty Hoosier sings on “Young Without Lovers.” On “A Ride Back Home,” the 56-year-old former Johnny Cougar is ready to lie down in a pine box: “I was showin’ some promise once upon a time/But it’s gone now, and it ain’t comin’ back.” There’s a full band backing him up, and a supple roots-rock groove with T-Bone Burnett producing and playing guitar, but the songs are uncommonly intimate, as if Mellencamp were singing them to himself, in between puffs on a cigarette in a darkened room, doing penance for forcing TV viewers to hear his “Our Country” Chevy commercials hundreds of thousands of times. And “Life Death Love and Freedom” is just about good enough to earn him forgiveness.
