THE EASY ROUTE? NOT FOR JOHN PRINE

John Prine's luminous new album, "Lost Dogs & Mixed Blessings," takes you on a journey. It goes from hope to despair -Mr. Prine's favorite trail -with side trips that give him time to mull over bittersweet love and his own wayward career.

The album opens with "New Train," one of the sunniest tunes this veteran singer-songwriter has ever composed. Mr. Prine has long specialized in turning bad love affairs and a dour philosophy of life into rollicking music festooned with witty word play. On '-New Train" he uses those skills to compose a song about fresh beginnings and redoubled inspiration. After nearly a quarter century of frequently superlative recordings that have never found a mass audience, his catchy little song about the ways people can repair the damage of their tough lives carries the weight of a manifesto -but a jaunty, exhilarating manifesto.

By contrast, the album concludes 13 cuts later with the warm glow of something rare, Mr. Prine singing a song he didn't write. "l Love You So Much It Hurts," a heartbreaking honky-tonk waltz written by Floyd Tillman in the 1940's, receives an interpretation of rough-hewn gorgeousness here as Mr. Prine croaks of his loneliness and pain, accompanied only by the gentle piano of Benmont Tench.

"Lost Dogs" (Oh Boy; CD and cassette) teems with good examples of Mr. Prine's most gratifying quirk as a songwriter: he takes a journeyman's pride in unifying metaphor and metrical precision, even as he indulges a boneheaded genius for scrambled syntax and loopy non sequiturs. You can hear these qualities in a couplet from "Ain't Hurtin' Nobody" - "Perfectly crafted popular hit songs never use the wrong rhyme/You'd think that waitress could get my order right the first time" -or in the way he makes an elaborate point of telling you that there were sausages sizzling on a fire when he fell in love with his future wife in "Lake Marie."

But some of the best tunes are also the simplest. "Day Is Done" has the tinkly prettiness and elementary vocabulary of a children's song, even while suggesting that its actual subject is a pair of illicit lovers. On This Love Is Real," Mr. Prine's hoarse croon is accompanied by Marianne Faithfull's scratchy one to achieve a lovely. plain-spoken ballad. And on the ripe, delicate All The Way With You," Mr. Prine takes the crass phrase going all the way" and turns it into a pledge of love meant to last a lifetime.

When Mr. Prine cut his debut album, John Prine," in 1971, this one-time Chicago mailman got lumped into that most unenviable of then-current categories: he was acclaimed a "new Dylan." Back then, anyone who strummed a guitar, puffed on a harmonica and wrote his own songs had to endure comparisons to Bob Dylan. From the start, however, Mr. Prine had the admiration of peers who recognized his originality: Bonnie Raitt's version of his "Angel From Montgomery" became a beloved staple of her own stage act, and Bette Midler recorded an eerie interpretation of "Hello In There," his unsentimental sketch of old age. To his artistic credit, Mr. Prine never opted for the easy route; he could have drained his music of the jagged, old-fashioned rock-and-roll he has always been drawn to and turned himself into a careerist folkie, gratifying an enthusiastic cult following with his generous goofiness. By remaining stubbornly true to his quirky mixture of folk melodicism and rock asperity, however, the commercial bottom fell out of Mr. Prine's career in the early 80's. Dropped by major record labels, he regrouped by forming his own company, Oh Boy Records, and selling subsequent collections by mail order. Then, in 1991, Mr. Prine caught a break: he hooked up with Howie Epstein from Tom Petty's band, the Heartbreakers. Mr. Epstein's crisp, unadorned, yet rocking production of Mr. Prine's album "The Missing Years" gave Mr. Prine the finest showcase his music had ever had. Then too, pop trends were finally coming around to meet his strengths. The increased interest in "Unplugged" acoustic performances, combined with a baby-boom generation grown old enough to feel nostalgic for the pre-punk music of its youth, turned Ms. Raitt, for example, into a platinum-selling star for the first time in her life. On a much smaller but still significant level, Mr. Prine sold well over 200,000 copies of "The Missing Years" - a major hit by the standards of the folk-rock marketing niche into which the music industry had long ago put Mr. Prine. Aside from the ample merits of its music, "Lost Dogs" now also has a radio format to help it get heard, Adult Album Alternative, for listeners who like adventurous music that doesn't singe the ear lobes. It has helped to launch such disparate acts as Sheryl Crow and the Crash Test Dummies as well as acting as home base for old pros like Ms. Raitt and Mr. Petty. With the sheen Mr. Epstein has given Mr. Prine's music, "Lost Dogs" is, for perhaps the first time in his career, a truly commercial venture for Mr. Prine. If its combination of quality and strategy prevails, he will have to figure out a way to write wry, bittersweet songs about a subject that'll be new to him: success. By Ken Tucker, New York Times