Anyone who's caught Marshall Crenshaw's live shows over the years knows two things: One, he's a world-class smartass, and two, he loves, loves, loves cover versions. He doesn't let his wisecracks get in the way of the covers, however. Crenshaw acknowledges that it's funny to hear a guy like him doing ABBA's "Knowing Me, Knowing You" (which was on his 1995 release "My Truck is My Home...Live") or Blue Oyster Cult's "Don't Fear the Reaper" (which he has yet to record, dammit), and then goes on to play them straight, as if to say, "These aren't just things you got sick of hearing on the radio, you know. They're really great songs."

So when Crenshaw covers Dobie Gray's "The 'In' Crowd" on "Miracle of Science," his first album of new material in five years, it's easy to hear it as just another tune Crenshaw always wanted to do and not as the casual career summation that it is. As a proclamation of with-it-ness, "The 'In' Crowd," with its talk about "a spot where the beat's really hot," was a pop relic not long after it hit. But Crenshaw's version packs in even more irony than Bryan Ferry's lounge-lizard stroll through the song on "Another Time, Another Place."

Is there any rocker less in with the in-crowd than Marshall Crenshaw? Crenshaw sings as someone who's confronted the realization that he's never going to be a star and has decided, "What the hell? Time to get on with things." Sixteen years and 10 albums into his career, he knows there's an irony in the idea that someone who has dedicated himself to classic mainstream pop songcraft hasn't been able to crack the mainstream, but there's no bitterness or superiority in his approach. Crenshaw's version of "The 'In' Crowd" is as laid-back and bemused as a boomer flipping through an issue of Spin at Wal-Mart. He has stayed true to the pop of the '50s and '60s not out of a purist's crankiness or disdain for current pop styles, but because he knows what looks best on him. Or, as his most consistent and articulate supporter, Village Voice critic Robert Christgau, once wrote, "No matter how genuine your commitment to the present, you can look pretty stupid adjusting to fashion."

Crenshaw doesn't have the spooky/moody obsessiveness of fellow retro-head Chris Isaak (which is precisely the thing that keeps Isaak's music from being comfortably smoothed over). But for all its tunefulness, "Miracle of Science" isn't exactly filled with happy little pop songs. The lovely "What Do You Dream Of?", "Laughter" and Crenshaw's cover of Grant Hart's "2541" (which was also covered last year on former Go Between Robert Forster's "I Had a New York Girlfriend") are brilliant translations of pop's adolescent dreaminess into the contingencies and uncertainties of adulthood.

In adolescent pop, the singer usually fantasizes that all his dreams will come true once he's lying next to his beloved. But Crenshaw sings, "What do you dream of/when you're lying next to me?" and even without the ambiguity of that verb, there's an implied distance from his lover. Things get even darker on "Laughter," where the chiming guitar lines keep turning into snaky ones, dragging Crenshaw's vocal attempts at flight back down to earth. "It's almost dawn/and everything's wrong," Crenshaw sings, dispelling any hope that there's going to be an easy solution, before facing up to his worst fear: "I'm afraid that I'm going to find/That the memory of your laughter will never leave my mind."

Crenshaw isn't a confessional performer. He'd never violate craft for that sort of rawness. That doesn't mean, though, that his music is underfelt. Most of us tend to assume that, with the exception of hacks like Diane Warren, professional pop songwriting went away with the Brill Building. But there's no reason to think that Crenshaw couldn't be one of the songwriters who serves the contemporary pop world in the way show composers served the pop and jazz singers of an earlier era. Listening to Crenshaw's "A Wondrous Place," you can imagine Des'ree singing the hell out of it. And I may be nuts, but "There and Back Again" sounds, to my ears at least, like a natural for Freddy Fender.

It's "There and Back Again," the album's closer, that offers Crenshaw's most forthright assessment of where he is now. "I'd rather go again," he sings, "take it from one who's been/there and back again." He sounds like a man who's accepted that he's never going to be the next big thing, but who realizes that he's stayed true to himself and to a pop lexicon he's never fallen out of love with. To be able to do that for 16 years ain't hay.