Going up

Jack Logan builds and fixes swimming-pool pumps in Doorville, Georgia, a suburb that's right on the lip of Atlanta. He makes the 40-minute drive to work each morning from Winder, a small town that's cheaper than Atlanta and not too far from the area's music capital, Athens. If he wanted to, Logan could go around boasting he's the only pump mechanic from Winder with two four-star reviews from Rolling Stone to his credit.

Actually, he must be the only mechanic in the world with credentials like that, but bragging doesn't seem to be in his nature. "All of those parties have taken off the shine/But I still look brand new in the shadows of the night," he croons in a world-weary voice that's as strong and grainy as an oak two-by-four on "Vintage Man," one of 17 tunes on his second release, Mood Elevator (Medium Cool/Restless). That's more Logan's style -- humble honesty with a touch of poetry and a storyteller's eye for details that most songwriters overlook even in the light of day.

Logan's been writing songs like "Vintage Man" for more than a decade now. But it wasn't until former Replacements manager Peter Jesperson (with a little help from R.E.M.'s Pete Buck) discovered him and released the two-disc Bulk (Medium Cool/Twin Tone) in 1994 that anyone other than Logan's close friends were privy to those tunes. That album was written and recorded at home in rootsy late-night jams with a loose collection of players called the Liquor Cabinet; Logan refers to them as "enablers." The 42 tracks on Bulk presented him as a raw yet immensely promising talent, capable of infusing drunken rants like "Fuck Everything" with sobering doses of wisdom, serving up apple-pie-size slices of the lost American Dream ("New Used Car and a Plate of Bar-b-que") without resorting to cliché, and viewing Generation X's new children of the damned ("Shrunken Head") with compassion, not condemnation.

"I could never write a strictly biographical or autobiographical song because that would take some of the fun out of it for me," he explains from his home. "I'm trying to be a fiction writer because, really, my life is just not that interesting. Most of my characters are not really sympathetic. They're not really good people. But except for a few choices, you or anybody else could be in their shoes. Hopefully, I'm past some of the stuff I'm writing about. But I know that some of my experiences and the experiences of my friends go into it somewhere."

Mood Elevator, as the title implies, has plenty of emotional ups and downs -- perhaps more of the latter. But mostly it offers, in the form of two- and three-minute guitar-driven rock songs, fascinating fragments of stories and thoughts that are too real to ignore. Like the outsider artists of the South, Logan collects used and forgotten scraps of life and hammers them into something new that's oddly familiar yet completely distinctive. There are "the notes and scribbled names eaten by the flames" and the faulty wiring in "What Was Burned," an understated acoustic track that's accented with pensive piano chords. There's the cry of a colicky baby that interrupts the "nervous calm" in "Ladies and Gentleman," a tuneful, driving rocker that uses few words to capture the awkward air of anticipation that descends on a room just before a big announcement that we never hear.

"I'm surprised I haven't caught more shit about not finishing that story," Logan admits with a hearty laugh, "but people seem to like to be able to fill in some of the blanks. I think for a three-minute pop song you don't want to spell everything out. And there's a certain heart-on-your-sleeveness quality that's not appealing to me. But I'm still surprised that I haven't caught more hell for being too vague or something."

Logan hasn't caught more hell because his songs deal with the universal themes of lonely alienation and redemption through suffering -- the accumulated disappointments of life in humble, bite-sized chunks. And the Liquor Cabinet, with their loose and ragged approach to gritty four-chord rock, intuitively steer him away from sanctimonious folk and country nostalgia -- roads too often traveled by earnest singer-songwriters. Unlike Bulk, Mood Elevator was recorded in a studio, a modest 16-track run by some friends in Indiana. But the Liquor Cabinet still rock comfortably, with the easygoing charm of friends who have spent years of late-night, beer-fueled sessions around the four-track.

"The Liquor Cabinet played around Athens but never to much of an audience," is how Logan sums up the band. "We're not used to playing in front of a lot of people. Mainly we just get together to write music and it revolves around the tape recorder rather than like a band. These days we do tour, but we just go out for two weeks at a time so that nobody loses their jobs. I think most of our employers are kind of excited for us and willing to cut us a little slack."