I am obsessing over the new Cooper Mini, wanting it very much because of its spunky, muscular stance and its headlights which seem to actually wink at you. I am seeing myself driving twisty roads in New England, without concerns. I need this car because for a week I have been doing nothing but listening to John Wesley Harding's new CD, The Man With No Shadow. It is a fabulous recording and I need a new car, and possibly a new life to go along with it.

Our publicists have decided that we are to meet. The thinking is, if I like the new CD, maybe I will be able to write something positive about it, letting others know. Cell phone numbers are passed along. E-mails exchanged.

We meet for lunch at a pricey midtown steakhouse. We pass on the $20 appetizers and he orders salmon, while I do steak. My first impression of John Wesley Harding the man is that he is very much like his music -wickedly clever, energetic, hip and very, very smart. "Have you read this yet?" he asks, producing a thick, paperback with an unattractive, text-book looking cover. I open it to find tiny type, hundreds of pages. Personally, I would rather inject myself with bleach than read such a book. "It's about street peddlers in Victorian England," he tells me. "This is the real stuff. This is what Dickens was writing about."

I seriously doubt that any of the Backstreet Boys have read this particular book.

Harding freely admits he gets his inspiration from a lot of unexpected places. Monkey And His Cat was inspired by a woodcut illustration in a book. It's a fanciful song, energetic and combines playful touches of phased vocals with sly and sinuous string lines. What does it mean? What would you like it to mean? One thing is certain, you won't be able to get it out of your head.

Harding is expert at taking the dusty and obscure and making it new and compulsively listenable. Consider Nothing At All, a song based on Shakespeare's King Lear. This song features gorgeous harmonies, and a stick-to-your-brain hook of a chorus that makes you want to stand in front of a full length mirror with a glass of wine and sway. It makes you want to slide the spaghetti straps off somebody's shoulder. It's a sexy song, plaintive and filled with longing.

However, the first single being released from the CD is Negative Love. It's easy to understand why Harding's label, Mammoth, chose this hopeful love song to lead with, because in a sense it's "classic" Harding. The lyrics were inspired by a poem of John Donne's called Negative Love. Yet instead of writing about a complicated conundrum in which the expression of God must be made in the negatives, Harding pared the thought to the bone and brought it home -to love. The mathematical rule that two negatives multiplied together make a positive is the reason this song is both cynical, and also inspiring and hopeful. Heady stuff. But when you listen to it, the melody goes straight to your bones. I was singing the melody for days, after hearing it once. Harding paired with Chris von Sneidern for the arrangement and this can be heard in the bass line.

One of my favorite singles from the new CD is Sluts. There's something so Gucci-suit sleek, and ultra-dry martini modern about this song that it seems destined for the silver screen. The song, Harding says, is about "sexual recklessness among the recently introduced." But to me, there's something decadent about it that transcends sex. It could be about any indulgence. It brings to mind images of a handsome weekend in Las Vegas, circa 1956, with a $4,000,000 tab, compliments of a distant gay uncle. Sluts is rousing and catchy enough to be the biggest frat boy shout-along since "Tubthumping" or "Who Let the Dogs Out," but built for smart people, too.

Gentle, rolling piano lines over surprising, shifting, soaring chord changes define Hard. While this song is about the defeat of love, "Hard" has a soaring quality to it that makes you want to stand at the edge of a cliff and raise your arms, while a Panovision Camera swoops around you. "It's hard that we changed/I send my best regards/We're strangers now/And that's hard." It's a sentiment everyone can relate to, somewhere we've all been. In less skilled hands, Hard could have been a very depressing tune. Here, it's aloft.

All of Harding's songs on The Man With No Shadow have an air of familiarity about them. And by this I don't mean they seem derivative. Quite the contrary. Harding has created melodies to go with his smart, clever lyrics that feel so inevitable, they already seem like hits. A perfect example of this is Pull. It's deceptively simple -- "What pulls you in," indeed. Here, Harding astonishes with what is, without a doubt, his best guitar solo -- an acoustic guitar solo. It is elegant, simple, and to my ear perfect. It makes me feel that I should immediately go out and get a Martin, despite the fact that I cannot even play a tambourine. Like a figure skater in the Olympics, Harding makes it seem so easy.

One thing that makes The Man With No Shadow such a breakout album for Harding is that it showcases his range as an artist. He can take you from danceable pop to sweeping emotion right into a somber and thickly gorgeous art song, like Sussex Ghost Story. It's haunting, powerful and wholly original ("After I had killed my wife/And by the jury been acquitted/I resolved to change my life/and try to lead a life less wicked") was recorded in London with the Gavin Bryars Ensemble. Think of a Merchant Ivory film, with the best lighting you've ever seen. And then add the trademark, Clever Wes Twist ®.

Other songs, It Stays, She Never Talks and Already Dead lodge themselves in your brain and you find yourself humming their refrains for days. When You Smile is like this, too. I feel certain it will be covered by Britney Spears when she releases her "Britney Sings The Classics" album when she's fifty.

Fans of John Wesley Harding, like myself, will be thrilled with this new CD. The Man With No Shadow is easily the artist's most accomplished work to date. Sometimes soaring, sometimes somber, The Man With No Shadow is unapologetically, unpretentiously, undeniably F-U.N. And for this, for the simple guts it takes to be fun in this age of polysyllabic, cross-referential, ironic, pop-intellectualism, to be fun is to be brave.

You know what? The Mini Cooper is too small. Make that a '57 Chevy.

Augusten Burroughs is the author of the forthcoming Running with Scissors: a memoir. He lives in New York City.