No replacement

Even if you didn't know the hard knocks Westerberg has taken in the past few years -- getting sober, the bust-up of his marriage, the demise of the Replacements, the commercial flame-out of his first solo album -- it would be hard to hear the man singing these songs as anything other than someone who's been through the wringer and chosen a more subdued life. Although Eventually's sense of self-imposed isolation precludes neither empathy nor hard-won contentment. The empathy Westerberg feels for the thwarted lovers of "Love Untold" lends a poignancy to the compromises settled for on "Once Around the Weekend."

Eventually doesn't have the brash variety of his last album, 14 Songs, which busted out all over the place. It's a one-day-at-a-time sort of album with slower songs (and perhaps the best singing Westerberg has ever done) predominating, and piano lines that wouldn't be out of place on adult contemporary radio. It's almost a folk-rock album. There are rockers -- all of them with Westerberg's characteristic sloppy bonhomie and smartass jokes ("Let's pin the tail on Demi Moore"; "I'm fadin' faster than a UK pop star") -- but they feel tossed off, terrific B-sides. Eventually might have been a tight EP without them, but it would also be less the spiky, shaggy charmer it is.

It's hard to think of another album as emotionally open and affecting that insists we travel to it instead of waiting for it to come to us. Yes, it's radio friendly (and "Love Untold," which will probably be the best-crafted single not by Oasis this year, deserves to be a monster hit), but it's also defiantly stubborn. On Eventually, Westerberg is doing what he wants, without apology, not giving a damn about people's expectations. Line after line refers, either explicitly or obliquely, to his having opted out of the rock-and-roll lifestyle. It's a look back in both anger and acceptance. Westerberg kisses off the sycophants ("I'm tired of the friend who uses me/To open doors like I was a skeleton key") and delivers a pained, withering assessment of his own excesses ("Hide 'n' seekin' behind a drink that's gone flat . . . Hide 'n' seekin's for children, baby"). The simple declaration of "Good Day" ("A good day is any day that you're alive") escapes sentimentality by the way Westerberg sings the line as if he knew that being able to sing it at all is merely the luck of the draw. He knows that fellow Replacement Bob Stinson, who finally died of drink last year, isn't here to say it.

How easy it is to screw up is the subtext of the heartbreaking "MamaDaddyDid." The song, Westerberg's explanation of why he won't have children, is done in a repetitive, almost nursery-rhyme style, reminiscent of Buddy Holly. But where Holly was singing about the boundlessness of true love's ways, Westerberg is singing about love's limits. "Decided not to have no mixed-up kid just like/My ma-ma-mom and daddy did . . . /They did okay/At least they tried," he sings, neither giving into self-pity nor shortchanging compassion -- simply acknowledging that, having finally gotten a handle on his own identity, he doesn't feel up to shepherding someone else's.

Which may also be why he refuses the mantle of elder rock statesman. Eventually is suffused with Westerberg's awareness that he's been around long enough to see a slew of bands for whom the Replacements are the touchstone. He refers to himself as an "old man," and there's bitterness in the way he sings, "These are the days no one sees . . . I am the day no one needs."

More than any other rocker, Paul Westerberg has been judged a sellout, a has-been, a traitor for having the temerity to grow up. That attitude reached its nadir a few years ago when a critic wrote that if Westerberg wanted to go off the wagon, he was buying. I'm convinced, from years of listening to the same thing from fans and rock writers, that this writer was speaking for plenty of other fans and critics who would have been happy to see Westerberg drink himself to death if only they could have another Let It Be.

But it's not hard to hear the humor and irony and empathy that mark the adolescent yearning of that album's "Sixteen Blue" echoed, from an older perspective, in the "I've been there" ache of "Love Untold." It misses the point to complain, as Terri Sutton did coyly in her Spin review, that Eventually is missing "um, some replacement of an adolescent image of excitement." What Westerberg is saying on Eventually, an album of modest pleasures and an immodest, generous heart, is that now, for him, life is about whatever comes. He's not interested in the replacements.