Sucker

"I've been duped by my biology," 43-year old Harlan T. Bobo says of Sucker, his third album for Goner Records. If Too Much Love, Bobo's solo debut, chronicled the dissolution of a soul-wrenching relationship, and his second album, I'm Your Man, captured the fits, starts and relapse of post-breakup emotions, Sucker narrates the life of a man who is, in his own words, "settling down." Despite the new album's tongue-in-cheek title, the dark confessional style that pervades I'm Your Man is largely replaced with a lighter attitude. Anguish gives way to an almost upbeat angst, and the gloom-and-doom allure of temporary romances is overcome by true love. On "Sweet Life," the opening track, the typically enigmatic Bobo unabashedly reminisces about traveling with - and wooing - Anne Ciriani, who would ultimately become his wife and the mother of his son, Nino. "The first time she broke my nose with a rum bottle, I knew it was love," Bobo says. The break-neck "Crazy with Loneliness" and the humorously meditative "Selfish Life" document his mental shift, while "Energy," "Drank," and "Mlle. Chat" record the physical adjustments he's made as the husband of a Frenchwoman who owns her own ice cream shop in Argeles, which Bobo describes as "the white trash camping spot of Europe." Occasionally, Bobo veers away from the fairytale to serve up alternate storylines, such as the frantic, Jerry Lee Lewis-meets-Television "Errand Girl," or "Hamster in a Cage," a sordid, yet beautifully written song about his short-lived Hollywood hustle. "Having a wife and a child doesn't mean I'm finished," he says. "If anything else, I'm more desperate to make music. The songs I'm writing now are a little more charged than they were a couple of years ago, when I had nothing to do but play music."