The coughing fit doesn't last long, but it's ferocious: Four sharp hacks, and then John Mellencamp can speak again. "Fuckin' cigarettes," he says, catching his breath. Mellencamp is sitting on a brown leather couch in the rural Indiana studio where he's recorded all of his music since 1985 — including a haunting new album called Life, Death, Love and Freedom that leans hard on the death part. It's disquieting stuff, especially from a guy who suffered a heart attack in 1994 and kept right on smoking. On the ghostly folk song "Don't Need This Body," Mellencamp sings of impending mortality in such stark terms ("Ain't gonna need this body much longer") that his wife and kids burst into tears when he played it for them.

Despite the doomy songs and smoker's cough, Mellencamp, 56, has no intention of checking out in the near future. "It's just a song!" he says, voice rising a couple of decibels from his usual gruff near-whisper. "They took it so personally." The mumbling is a remnant of a long-vanished childhood stutter; the twangy accent is a pure product of geography; the laconic tough-guy drawl is on permanent loan from the James Dean and Paul Newman movies he watched over and over as a kid. He is wearing what he almost always wears: a black T-shirt tucked into Levi's, and black leather boots. "I haven't changed my fuckin' clothes in 40 years," he says, brushing ashes off his shirt.

Sitting beneath a giant reproduction of a vintage Johnny Cash concert poster, his feet up on a stool, Mellencamp takes a bite of a peanut-butter sandwich and tries to explain why he's recorded the darkest music of his career — songs about lonely old men, racist juries, carny murderers. Here, the darkness and anxiety that lurked at the edges of his Reagan-era hits move center stage — these are anti-anthems for bleak American times, when Jack and Diane can't afford gas to drive to the Tastee Freez, and the banks are foreclosing on all those little pink houses. "The album title is perfect — Life, Death, Love and Freedom," Mellencamp says. "If you listen to Jimmie Rodgers, Hank Williams, Woody Guthrie, those were traditional topics in American folk songs — the songs are about the parts of life that most people don't really want to discuss. Which doesn't necessarily work for pop music that record companies really want to put out. I made this album for me."