Fast And Easy For Former Replacements Singer And Songwriter Paul Westerberg, His Best Stuff Comes Effortlessly

Beneath the wry smile of Paul Westerberg lies the truth his fans long have feared.

“I never even liked punk music,” he says, poking a straw into the ice in his ginger ale. “I liked pop music and rock ‘n’ roll. We combined the two. The fact we were sort of louts made it authentic.”

As the drunken legend of the Replacements swirled around him, Westerberg gamely played along, ripping off slurred Hank Williams covers and adolescent anthems drenched in feedback. But the sensitive singer-songwriter in him was struggling to emerge.

At 36, Westerberg finally has made peace with a reputation earned by fronting the ‘Mats, as the seminal 1980s Minneapolis band came to be known. Critics still marvel at the club gigs the foursome turned into alcoholic spectacles and the sweet lyricism they blended with their self-described “power trash” style.

‘Mat fans may stew over the former symbol of ripped-jeans rebellion awaking at dawn, rhapsodizing about trees and writing songs about parenthood, but he takes obvious delight in this new chapter. The old way is foreign now.

“I’ve grown accustomed to the opposite of the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle,” Westerberg says. “I wake up every morning and I know where I am.”

Westerberg’s second solo album, “Eventually,” has just come out. He’s smoking cigarillos and nibbling bread in the booth of a tony restaurant overlooking one of his hometown’s many lakes. Talk centers on the stripped-down feel of the new record, which he largely produced himself.

“I go with sort of an old-fashioned motto and creed that it’s either simple or it’s impossible,” he says. “If it doesn’t come easy, and if it doesn’t come fast, then it’s usually wrong.”

Several of the album’s 12 tracks derive from first or second takes, including “Good Day,” a piano-based ballad partly inspired by the death last year of former Replacements guitarist Bob Stinson. Late in the tune, its chorus, “A good day is any day that you’re alive,” is paired ironically with a classic ‘Mats line, “Hold my life one last time.”

Westerberg hasn’t lost the gift for coupling a winning lyric with a seductive melody. “You’ve got a voice like the last day of Catholic school,” he sings in his craggy tenor in “You Ain’t Got Me.” He dots the ambling album-closer “Time Flies Tomorrow” with images of hearts breaking “like a pinata” and “eyes like two hubcaps at the bottom of a river.”

“I like picturesque words,” he says. “I like a line that you can visualize, and if it makes you smile. … I mean, ‘Pin the tail on Demi Moore’ (from ‘Trumpet Clip’), what does it mean? I’m not sure, but it’s an interesting thought.”

One thought that doesn’t make him smile is the common perception that since he quit drinking several years ago, Westerberg has traveled the familiar solo artist’s road to sober but uninspired self-interest. Cynics point to his inert 1993 solo album, “14 Songs,” and recent contributions to soundtracks for television’s “Friends” and “Melrose Place” as proof that a dry Paul is, well, dry.

Westerberg stiffens at the suggestion. “People are preoccupied with what they see as being sort of a landmark in someone’s life or changing their music. There are so many little things that they never see. I can hear when I got a good acoustic guitar, when my songs started to sound different, or when I bought a new instrument or when I stopped wearing a certain kind of clothes. It’s a little more ordinary things than you would imagine.”

The issue is more than just sobriety. Some songwriters struggle, too, with finally getting total control over an album after maturing within a collaborative band setting.

There is relief in the voice that used to sing with “the next Rolling Stones” as many critics anointed the Replacements. He’s no longer “the next big thing.” He has admirers and detractors and can take or leave them both - a thought that never occurred to Paul Westerberg until recently.

“What I do can be art and it’s mine,” he says. “But when it’s time to go do it, it is business. You can’t just pretend it isn’t. When somebody pays some money and wants to look up to you like you’re something special, it’s almost your responsibility to be like, ‘Hey, for tonight I’ll be your little star. But I don’t have to bring this home with me.”’