Still Crisp

During a discussion of Cracker’s new album, the band’s leader, David Lowery, makes a pronouncement that’s startling, coming from a rock musician under the age of 40.

“This record is where we’re really conscious that we’re not gonna be young anymore,” he says. “This record is a lot more about our age.”

The 37-year-old musician is talking about the title track, “Gentleman’s Blues,” a spare, reflective, grown-up ballad, which core members Lowery, guitarist Johnny Hickman and bassist Bob Rupe felt embodied the sense of passage they experienced while recording Cracker’s fourth album.

But he might just as easily be referring to the impish “Wild One,” a noisier encounter with an unruly youngster, to whom the singer confides, “I was once like you.”

Lowery considers the ability to grow old gracefully essential to maintaining a rock band’s dignity. Friendly and reflective during an interview, the tall, slightly rumpled songwriter talks easily about the past but doesn’t cling to it, directing much of his low-key enthusiasm at the present and the future.

Seated outdoors at the rented Hollywood Hills home where the Counting Crows are recording their next album, which Lowery is co-producing, the man who once urged ‘80s college-radio listeners to “Take the Skinheads Bowling” admits that teenagers probably won’t “get” the songs on “Gentleman’s Blues.” And he doesn’t really mind.

“Our audience is definitely adult, and I’m really comfortable with that,” says the Virginia-based artist, who founded Cracker in 1992 with Hickman, a pal from his boyhood in Redlands. “As some bands get older, they’re so desperate to have a young, hip crowd like them. It gets sort of sad.”

Throughout his 14-year career, Lowery has been more likely to make fun of the young, hip crowd--even when he was considered hip in some circles.

When he fronted the ‘80s indie folk-punk confab Camper Van Beethoven, his sociopolitical and culture-critical rants made him one of the early obscure geniuses of college rock. In the ‘90s, with the more commercially viable roots-rockin’ white soul of Cracker, he has performed a rare feat among his post-punk peers: actually getting a mainstream audience to embrace his literate, absurdist viewpoint.

While longtime fans may complain that Lowery doesn’t get enough credit for successfully going populist with his insights without totally losing his edge, the songwriter takes the lack of recognition in stride.

“I wish I got the same kind of press that, say, a Paul Westerberg got,” he admits, but “it has also kept me hungry, and it’s made me better at what I do.”

It bothers Lowery much more that critics don’t always get what he does. That is, they don’t realize that his often sarcastic songs aren’t always meant as jokes. “I use irony and humor to tell a story, but there are also these serious things.”

Maybe there’s not a lot of subtlety in such cartoonish Cracker protest songs as the anti-alienation anthem “Teen Angst (What the World Needs Now)” and the grunge caricature “I Hate My Generation,” but Lowery and his mates are quite capable of making more refined points.

In fact, Lowery’s sarcasm is more refined on “Gentleman’s Blues,” maybe because the players have plumbed their abilities to discreetly yet radically shift moods. The album shakes off the forced experimentation of 1996’s “The Golden Age” in favor of a more natural sound that’s still abidingly eclectic.

Hickman’s stellar, nuanced guitar work fluidly adapts to twangy rockers and dreamlike ballads, while Lowery’s nasal rasp gives voice to characters with good lives and bad, who invariably carry one of his most consistent messages: You control your destiny, so quit whining and face it.

The elliptical music-business parable “Star,” for example, is less a flat-out indictment of the big, bad biz than a rumination on the lure of fame. “It’s not really that sympathetic toward the artists,” notes Lowery, who says he was inspired by the experiences of some musicians he knows but won’t name. Given Cracker’s own unique career trajectory, it isn’t surprising that Lowery is currently more interested in illuminating the gray areas of the record business, rather than ranting in black and white.

At a time when celebrated cult figures like Kristin Hersh and Elvis Costello have had to find new homes on independents, Cracker has hung onto its comfortable major-label niche, offsetting just-passable sales with profitable concert tours. “ ‘Kerosene Hat’ is platinum, which is astounding to me,” says Lowery, referring to Cracker’s second album, from 1993. But he doesn’t equate longevity with sales. “A lot of bands get on the radio and sell millions, and then they disappear.”

Lowery feels confident that Cracker won’t fade that fast. “We can play [a show] any time, whether we have a record out or not, whether we have a song on the radio or not, and people will come out,” he says. “I feel like we’re somebody’s favorite band, and a lot of bands can’t say that.”