You get the sense, when listening to an album by John Mark McMillan, that there is another America out there. It's an America more real than the one you're used to: the one of endless car dealerships, sprawled out suburbia, and shoeshine religion. This is not that America. This is the America that exists, breathing and living, outside the realm of blue state and red state allegiance. This is the America built on the backs of the bruised and the broken, the America of under-produced country music and fuzzed out rock and roll and old time gospel.

Though McMillan's most recent release, The Song inside the Sounds of the Breaking Down, may open up with the deceptively Anglo-centric "London town", the sound was most definitely born in the U.S.A. From the banjos and tube crunch of "Breaking Down" to the careening, slightly drunken "Next to You Now", McMillan and company have crafted an album that sonically stretches from sea to shining sea, subtly pulling from influences as disparate as Springsteen, Whiskeytown, and Death Cab for Cutie.

Lyrically, John Mark McMillan thinks like a poet. Lines like "I've been walking in my sleep/digging trenches in the pavement with the soles of my feet" and "I dreamed I kissed your feet/between the cigarette butts on the side of fourteenth street" wind their way through the tunes like Carolina copperheads. The result is a thread that binds all of McMillan's music together: being broke down. Whether it's the death of a friend or the distance of a lover, the ghost that haunts John Mark's soul seems to brood on the back of his brokenness. And really, from the blues to Bob Dylan, what could be more American than that?