There’s a select group of pop songwriters (Tommy Keene and Jeff Tweedy come to mind) who can make you feel glad to be alive without writing a single happy song.  Joe Adragna joins that company with the latest Junior League album (on which he again does the lion’s share of the singing and playing). Lyrically it’s full of downcast thoughts—one of its catchiest tunes is about death—but it’s also full of soaring tunes that give an uplift at every turn.

One of his favorite moves is to build a straightforward pop song around a more complex storyline: “The Whiskey Talking” appears to be about a woman who waits for drunken moments to reveal the family secrets she knows; and “The Me and Them” about the voices you grow up with that can torment you in later life. Yet both tunes, especially the latter, have indelible chorus hooks and clever production touches that emerge with repeated listens. “When the Question Comes” adds a bit of Motown strut to suit its story of a couple who can’t say they love each other, even if they do.

The sound here is less ’60s-informed than previous Junior League and more based in modern indie pop, leaning toward Adragna’s other band, the Minus Five, part of the R.E.M. family tree, and some of that jangle turns up here. But since he’s mostly working alone, he can take on whatever styles comes to mind: “1973 Nervous Breakdown” is about adolescence and references one of his musical saviors, David Bowie (though the sound is more  Hunky Dory than the lyrically referenced Ziggy Stardust). Speaking of the ’70s, the one cover here, “When I Got Home” comes from the one and only 1972 album by songwriter Pamela Polland. He not only deserves crate-digger immortality for digging it up, but making it sound as if the Byrds had covered it around that time. So, the album’s loose-knit radio concept makes sense; there was a time when pop radio brought all this good stuff together.