John Mellencamp, “Orpheus Descending.”

You can’t really call Orpheus Descending, the new album by John Mellencamp, significantly cheerier than his last, Strictly a One-Eyed Jack. But even if most of the 11 new songs here are attacking something or someone, they’re preoccupied with bigger matters. The now 71-year-old Mellencamp pays more attention to social ills than to personal shortcomings.

Case in point: “The Eyes of Portland,” which focuses Mellencamp’s vitriol on the homelessness crisis. “They have no place to go, and nothing to do,” he sings about the people he sees filling up the streets, the “fallen and forgotten in this land of plenty where nothing gets done.” He doesn’t stop with local government. He also asks, “Where are the loved ones?”

With his increasingly ravaged voice lending his words both added gravitas and bitterness, Mellencamp on Orpheus Descending is treading fairly familiar territory, having moved two decades ago from the top-40 pop rocker of “Jack and Diane” and “I Need a Lover” to a purveyor of pop Americana (“Paper in Fire,” “Human Wheels”) and, after that, to his current perch as a world-weary (with emphasis on “weary”) observer of his surroundings.

On another song, he concludes that Americans (and possibly others) are allowing their rights to be taken from them and “don’t seem to notice or care,” and that you don’t have to look far to see “We need a little lightning and luck.”

Even if it sometimes seems he’s wallowing in grievance, his grievances are legitimate, generally deserving of the shots he’s taking. And he comes at things from the perspective of someone who’s done a lot of living, and fairly well qualified to offer hot takes on the state of the world.

In “Hey God,” John Mellencamp takes dead aim at gun violence and, especially, school shootings. “Weapons and guns, are they really my right?” he asks. “No one could imagine the sight of so many dead on the floor.” He notes that today’s world is vastly different from the one in which the Second Amendment was drafted more than 250 years ago.

He does indeed get personal on the album’s final two songs. On “Perfect World,” he ruminates about lost love in his own style: “I’d never let you slip through my fingers in a perfect world.” And on “Backbone,” he concludes the album by saying he wants to die with his dignity and honor intact.

Save for the piano-based “Understated Reverence,” these songs all depend almost entirely on acoustic guitars (including a liberally applied National slide), fiddle and drums, and sound Americana-ish. Only one song here, “Amen,” features a full-on electric guitar solo. Even when they start to sound a little samey, this instrumentation, usually sparse, serves the material – and Mellencamp’s scratchy talk-singing – pretty well.

There’s no doubt John Mellencamp is pretty crusty at his advanced age, and he’d probably be the first to admit it. But that’s a lot more credible coming from someone who has seen what he’s seen, and who has the, well, backbone to say it – and not simply shout it. Amen.

Follow journalist Sam Richards at Twitter.com/samrichardsWC.