Over his past few albums, Todd Snider morphed from a wisecracking country-ish journeyman to the sharpest and funniest protest singer working today—Pete Seeger with a pickup truck and a sense of humor. But more than seven years into the reign of George Bush, Snider isn’t laughing anymore. On this eight-song EP—available for free on his Web site—the amiable 42-year-old lends his peach-cobbler drawl to songs about maimed soldiers and power-drunk bullies, a doleful cover of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Fortunate Son” and “Mission Accomplished (Because You Gotta Have Faith),” which deploys a Bo Diddley beat to excoriate a leader who “drove us off a cliff and told us we were flyin’.” Still, the real evildoer is the protagonist in “Dividing the Estate (A Heart Attack)”—an 800-pound gorilla of a metaphor named Sam, who as a youngster was humble and idealistic but wound up fat, rich and unhappy with his standing in the world and too lazy to do anything about it. Sound like any country you know?

DOWNLOAD “Stuck on the Corner ­(Prelude to a Heart Attack),” “The Ballad of Cape Henry”