After the Grief, a Little More Warmth

“On a lighter note,” said David Baerwald during his show at the Mint on Sunday, to introduce a noir-ish out-of-love song titled “The Toughest Whore in Babylon.”

Well, that was a lighter note compared with the thematic thread of several songs he’d just done from his album “Here Comes the New Folk Underground.” The album, due July 16, is drawn from songs he’d written and originally recorded after the death of a friend’s 7-year-old son four years ago, and they offer support for an argument that no human emotion--not love, not anger, not fear--is greater than grief.

What the experience seems to have done for Baerwald is soften and humanize the detachment that long marked his savage, cynical observations. Even such older songs as the jaundiced L.A. tour “Boomtown,” from his days with the duo David + David, took on warmth-by-association alongside the newer songs.

Working with a four-piece band anchored by bassist Will Sexton on Sunday--the first of two nights on a bill with singer-songwriters Abra Moore and Sheila Nicholls--the former Angeleno (he’s now based in Austin) split the difference between Woody Guthrie and Tom Waits musically and lyrically.

Not that he’s backed off from the blunt, Brechtian sociopolitical brutality of his last solo album, “Triage” (1993). But in the new “Hellbound Train,” which charged along like “Highway 61 Revisited”-period Dylan, he places himself in the locomotive among doomed abusers of power. And when, in a monologue added to the song, the devil tells him he deserves to be there, he shrugs and says, “You got a point there, buddy.”

It wasn’t even too jarring when he followed that with a solo acoustic encore of “Come What May,” the baldly sentimental love song Baerwald co-wrote for the movie “Moulin Rouge.”

With no ironic winks, it further humanized Baerwald as an artist of earnest emotions, dark and light.