Instead, on Life Death Love & Freedom, Mellencamp has stripped the songs down to their barest — and quite frankly, very dark sounding minimum. Although, this isn't quite Mellencamp's Nebraska, the feel here overall is still very stark, folkish and bluesy. The characters who populate the songs here are likewise simple folk in search of something as seemingly universal — yet, nonetheless hard to find — in their everyday lives as just finding a way out. If there is a unifying theme here, it is one that is deeply personal, and cuts right to the bone.

Speaking of the songs themselves, lyrically speaking they are populated by characters searching for redemption anywhere they can find it. Like the guy "handing out scripture like we wrote it ourselves" on "Without A Shot." So, in that respect the landscape found on much of this record is a bleak one, but not one without hope. Most often, the characters here are simply looking for "A Ride Back Home." On this particular song, in a plea to Jesus, the subject even adds "I won't you bother you no more."

On perhaps the album's most widely publicized in advance song, "Jena," Mellencamp doesn't dwell on the specific events of the whole Jena 6 deal, but rather cuts to the core of racism itself in the line, "Jena, take your nooses down."

Just for the record here, not all of the songs on Life Death Love & Freedom feature stripped down arrangements, and in fact many of them are performed full-on by Mellencamp's crack touring band. The current single, "My Sweet Love" (do those even really exist anymore if you're not somebody like Lil Wayne?) for example crackles with a rockabilly feel, set to great gospel backing vocals. Likewise, "Troubled Land" has a nice Dylanesque keyboard riff that punctuates its message of "judgment day closer all the time."

The bottom line is I really like this record. A lot.

And T-Bone Burnett has done one hell of a job in stripping Mellencamp's great new songs down to their barest core in the interest of getting their message — starkly out there as it often is — across.

The deluxe edition is also the first to be recorded using the CODE technology, which is said to capture the warmth of the original recordings like nothing else has since digital became the standard.

I'm not sure I'm ready just yet to buy into the hype about this being Mellencamp's best since such and such an album. But Life Death Love & Freedom is, at the very least, a pretty great sounding record.