Country discomfort

The latest rumor around British ex-punk Graham Parker, 53, is that he’s now produced his “country record.” There’s some truth to that: “Your Country,” just out on Bloodshot Records, offers lap steel guitar and harmonica as well as a duet with Lucinda Williams.

But Parker -- who broke in the latex ‘70s alongside fellow Angry Young Man Elvis Costello -- is not belatedly jumping the twang bandwagon.

“The country influence was not quite as overwhelming to me as soul music,” Parker says. “But every kind of music that was not longhaired progressive music -- psychedelia and all that seemed very out of date by about 1973 -- interested me.” He was drawn more to Charley Pride and Neil Young’s “Harvest,” and says he “wrote things with a country lilt from the beginning.”

He liked the melancholy of rural music. “It’s like the yearning of Otis Redding,” he says. “On the new record, they’re not facile songs where I’m trying to be clever, as I sometimes do.”

Despite his interest in Americana, Parker still feels like an outsider when he looks at stateside politics.

“I’m constantly surprised by the power of the conservative engine in this country,” he says. “When I first came here, I thought, ‘This country is the future.’ The attitudes seemed to be really liberal. I’m surprised there’s not a civil war going on, when you look at the division.”

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Graham Parker, Knitting Factory, 7021 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood. Wednesday, 7 p.m. $17. (323) 463-0204.