Now here’s irony for you: the first mainstream-accessible album by former Phish head Trey Anastasio comes tied down to a player that my Gateway can’t access. That is, the promo copy does. This is what I get for using an older OS even the viruses are passing by.

I can’t blame Sony. This is the lead singer of a band whose fans traded bootlegs more often than Deadheads or Ten Clubbers, making an album aimed squarely at the kind of people who rip CDs without a second thought. The jam band scene was largely created through bootlegs, but if they could bootleg Shine, would they know what to do with it? Three-minute songs? With hooks? And Beatle chords? Good God.

Lest you get broadsided by someone with a copy of Trampled By Lambs And Pecked By The Dove, however, understand that this is a good sellout. Recorded in Atlanta with Brendan O’Brien (Pearl Jam, Black Crowes) producing, Shine doesn’t attempt to rewrite Anastasio’s personality, just adjust his focus. It’s a songwriter’s album, in other words, and not only do the pop charts reward this kind of uplifting, generally sunny roots rock, but this’ll be a boon for everyone who kept defending his old group as Not Just Another Jam Band.

If it weren’t for the clunky, tie-dyed lyrics, for example, you might confuse “Come As Melody” for one of Stone Temple Pilots’ poppier moments or “Air Said To Me” as one of Lemonheads’ least. Fans of his old band will get momentary flashbacks from the complex, wiggly guitar line in the melancholy “Spin” or the boho reveries of “Sweet Dreams Melinda.” There are even a few choice words planted for obsessives to in the wake of the band’s breakup, such as “Sleep Again” or “Black” (“Just let it slip away”).

But in the end, the unsurprising yet sturdy pop-rock classicism of these dozen cuts (anchored mainly by O’Brien on bass/keyboards and vet Kenny Aronoff on drums) recall nothing in their twin piano-guitar focus and upbeat nature so much as Tom Petty’s or George Harrison’s work of the Reagan-Bush era. A post-alt Traveling Wilburys album for jam band fiends? Man, that scene IS getting old.