Conversely, the first chorus you hear on Penn's new album, MP4: Days Since a Lost Time Accident, is so ebullient that it actually dares to contain the line -- sung brightly and unabashed -- "here comes the millennium!" Of course, since it's Penn, the real sentiment of "Lucky One" is more complex. It lies closer to grudging hope: comical circumspection ("things got bad, things got worse/I got loaded in a hearse/when all I needed was a nurse") clad in the sheep's clothing of naked optimism ("I must be the lucky one/the luckiest in luckydom"). But where Resigned -- like his 1992 masterpiece Free-for-All and his 1989 debut, March -- hunkered down to the job of finding artful ways to examine the ruins of love, MP4's lens is a lot wider, scoping the same situations without leaning so heavily on who did what to whom. Particularly in songs like "The Whole Truth" and "High Time," he now seems more interested in the whys.
In a telephone interview, Penn characterizes his previous albums as "kind of reporting the occurrences, the fallout of certain dynamics in relationships. This one maybe hopefully addresses the reasons for them a bit more," he says. "It's just [a question of] growing and learning and trying to figure out why I get into the patterns I get into in my own life... and trying to make it rhyme, and you know... meter."
Depending on one's inclination as a listener, the improbably perfect rhymes either sound like the pinnacle of human endeavor or a precious cul-de-sac off the expressway of language. (Much like Magnetic Fields' 69 Love Songs can strike different people as the most and the least sincere record ever made.) Penn revels in them like a pederast at a Boy Scout Jamboree. Though he's always been a sharp observer of the subtle tremors of interpersonal tectonics, he's often applauded merely as a canny wordsmith, or assailed as an over-writer. True enough, his songs crackle with craftiness, and he rarely settles for only double meaning; "If I wear apathy's crown, don't call me Highness/it's a long way down," goes the chorus of "Long Way Down." But his shrewd verbal architecture grants the songs a universal self-consciousness; the rhyme fixation yields magnum triumphs like "Bunker Hill" ("Try/but you can't hide/Impossible, you're lit from the inside"), where the beauty of the images and the complicated tenderness of the sentiment banish clever-clever. Those concise convolutions open the door to blunt, beautiful, ugly truth.
"I think too much is made of it, clearly," Penn declares. "There's an aspect to [crafty wordplay] that appeals to me. But the only times that I ever use it for myself is when it's about economy; when I can say more than one thing -- not a pun necessarily -- but a phrase that can communicate a couple of different ideas. For me the challenge is to make language sound melodious, and kind of have its own internal laws."
As to the question of his critical reputation as a literary muscle-flexer, Penn humbly demurs: "It's the kind of thing that can be completely gimmicky and horrible, and hopefully I don't cross that line. I don't think I do it that much; that's the weird part. Free-for-All is the only time I've been conscious of [leaning on wordplay]. I was trying to invent a new way of writing lyrics for myself. As an exercise. And it had to do with utilizing language in that kind of intricate way. But apart from that album, it hasn't really been more than the occasional line where, for it to be melodious or for me to be able to say what I wanted to say in a condensed way, I've sort of utilized that kind of... you know... (sigh)... usage."
