Michael Penn

Michael Penn sings in “Lucky One,” the first song on his remarkable new album, MP4:

Things got bad/things got worse
I got loaded in a hearse
and all I needed was a nurse
believe me, I’m not Lying
I must be the lucky one/the luckiest in Luckydom
Who reached the moon/but wound up numb
Now that I’ve had my fun/here comes the millennium

It’s a characteristic Penn lyric: artful and sharp, backed up by an indelible melody. The song’s meaning is simultaneously wry and wise, ironic and earnest.

“Basically, it’s my nursery rhyme for the millennium,” Penn laughs. “Y’know, we’ve made it this far, we put a man on the f**king moon, but we’re still the same damaged goods. I’m searching for love and truth and gearing up for the challenge as I buy a new calendar.”

A dazzling collection of pop songs, tough and funny and very human, MP4 (Epic/FiftySeven Records) is ambitious, provocative, and moving music. Not for Penn the facile formula, the hackneyed phrase or the self-indulgent experiment. He writes songs the way a true storyteller pens fiction: finding the universal in the personal, the perennial truth in the everyday moment.

It’s music that comes with a history that has consistently garnered extravagant critical praise.

Indeed, from “Lucky One” with its tambourines, chimes and syncopated rhythms to the piano-driven beauty of “Bucket Brigade,” MP4 builds on an impressive legacy.

At the beginning of the ’90s, Penn arrived on the scene with March. “No Myth,” the album’s No. 13 hit single, was hailed as “a near-perfect pop song” by The Rolling Stone Album Guide. Next came 1992’s Free-for-All, a darker set of introspective songs, their lyrics more freely open-ended (“stunning” said Rolling Stone). With 1997’s Resigned, his Epic/Fifty Seven label debut, Penn again drew raves for songs like “Try,” “Out Of My Hands,” and “I Can Tell” that grabbed his listeners with instantly appealing hooks and yet lingered in the memory, their meanings richly suggestive and poetically compressed.

“I love that I get to do this for a living. I love working out the puzzle of saying what I mean lyrically and melodically ; trying to capture a unified emotion in both.”

“I’m basically writing about the things that interest me, and it also helps me to figure things out in my own life. I like to write about relationships and dynamics, the ways that people act and speak. There are these recognizable patterns. They are the same ones that everybody gets in and out of.”

In its variations on the themes of desire, loss and hope, MP4 takes a clear-eyed look at the varieties and vagaries of love: from “Perfect Candidate,” a song about somebody looking for that one person who’ll make everything right (but really for a blank slate to project their expectations upon) to “Bucket Brigade,” a vignette about a relationship in flames.”Beautiful” muses on appearance and artifice. It’s about missteps and the sense of fraudulence we sometimes feel, capable of amazingly elaborate rationalizations. Michael sings

Always tragic perfect bait/They grip you as they captivate Twist, but do not fabricate/Then imply they implicate You get thirsty while you wait/A demonstrator demonstrates That you’ve run out of holy water, dude

On “Don’t Let Me Go,” the singer’s voice starts out low and sepulchral against sampled percussion and a bluesy guitar, as his lyrics render the complexities of need (“Black hole/Falling in/Don’t let me go”). “Trampoline” provides a perfect metaphor for the up-down/rescuer-rescued interchange of lover and beloved, the highs that alternate with the inevitable plunge, the times when “gravity pulls through.”

It’s Penn’s strongest work yet, and marks the first time he’s served as his own producer. “I’ve always loved working in the studio,” he notes. “I can point up nuances and detail in songs that I can’t live .” To back up his own guitar and bass playing, Michael worked again with longtime ally Patrick Warren on keyboards and Victor Indrizzo on drums. Penn’s wife Aimee Mann and brother Christopher sang backing vocals, as did Grant Lee Phillips (Grant Lee Buffalo), Buddy Judge (the Grays) and “Lucky One” producer Brendan O’Brien (Rage Against The Machine, Penn’s Resigned).

New York City-born, Michael Penn was reared in a milieu of film and art: his mother Eileen Ryan a stage and screen actress, his father Leo a director blacklisted during McCarthy’s notorious Red Scare and an actor in such venerated pictures as William Wyler’s The Best Years Of Our Lives.

Michael began playing in a cover band as a teenager; by the mid 1980s, he’d joined up with Patrick Warren in the post-new wave group Doll Congress. Then came March and relentless roadwork; Free-for-All and a deepening of his songwriting skills; and Resigned, with its songs burnished to sharp, crisp edge.

In 1997, Penn drew enthusiastic crowds on a summer-long tour with Sheryl Crow. Around that same time, he also scored two films: the highly regarded Hard Eight and the sensational Boogie Nights.

MP4 is the latest chapter in a work-in-progress. The music is honest and real. The songs alternate edge and empathy, infectious tunes and insightful wit.