Depending on how you count, Jon Langford has as many as three new albums out, and when City Paper catches up with him, he's hard at work on yet another. Towards the end of last year, The Mekons, the revolving-cast group of anarchist art-punks Langford's been a part of since their inception, celebrated their 25th anniversary with the release of OOOH! (Out of Our Heads) (Quarterstick). Meanwhile, the hard-rocking Waco Brothers released New Deal (Bloodshot), with Langford taking lead vocals on a good portion of the songs. And, as if that weren't enough, here comes The Mayors of the Moon (Bloodshot), featuring Langford backed up by Toronto's multifaceted Sadies. It's surprising he has time to breathe, let alone talk.

But for a man who releases albums with such alarming frequency, it's a little surprising that Langford's come up with only two solo albums in his long career, the other being 1998's Skull Orchard. It turns out that despite his prolific discography -- which also includes a handful of albums from the Three Johns, as well as work with the countryish Pine Valley Cosmonauts -- Langford isn't all that comfortable writing songs on his own. "I'm good at writing Waco Brothers tunes, [which are] basically fairly derivative, extremely immediate three-chord thrashes," he says, calling from the studio. That restricts the kinds of lyrics Langford can set to music, but if he's a self-confessed slouch in the melody department, no such limitations apply to his lyric writing.

Enter The Sadies, led by brothers Travis and Dallas Good, who in addition to releasing four albums of their own -- including the brand-new Stories Often Told (Yep Roc) -- are a multifaceted backing band extraordinaire, having hit the road with Neko Case, Kelly Hogan and Andre Williams. Langford tapped The Sadies, who not incidentally opened The Mekons' 25th anniversary shows as a Mekons tribute band, to score a number of lyrics he'd been working on over the years but had never been able to set to music himself. "I had quite a lot of lyrics that were sitting around, and I didn't quite know what to do with them," he recalls. "I sort of handed a jiffy bag over to them with about 15 pieces of paper in it, and they came back with these interesting melodies I had to go and sing."

The results often surprised him, particularly on the album's third track, "Looking Good for Radio." "I thought it was funny when I wrote it, three verses of a song that would probably be about 30 seconds long -- kind of yelled and stupid, and totally glib," Langford says. "It was just a novelty song, the sort of thing you look at the next day and feel embarrassed to have written. But with a little bit of tweaking and a middle eight stuck in, and the way Travis wrote the music, it ended up this poignant thing."

If Mayors of the Moon doesn't precisely wax confessional, songs like the lilting "Strange Birds" and the spectral "Shipwreck" show a more reflective side of Langford than the Wacos' drunken anthems or The Mekons' cryptic ramblings. But if the album puts Langford's politics on the back burner, it's hardly a permanent shift. This is, after all, a man who's prone to remind audiences before he covers "Joshua Gone Barbados" that the song's about striking Jamaican plantation workers, and who was recently honored for his part in releasing The Executioner's Last Songs, Vol. 1, a compilation benefiting the Illinois Death Penalty Moratorium Project. As we talk, he's getting ready to record soul singer Otis Clay for volume two, tentatively scheduled for May, which will go to the same cause on a national level. (Other planned contributors include Mark Eitzel, Dave Alvin and Lambchop's Kurt Wagner.) Not surprisingly, Langford has nothing but praise for outgoing Illinois Gov. George Ryan, who recently commuted the sentences of every prisoner on the state's death row after the commission he appointed found the state's death penalty to be critically flawed. "There's a lot of small-minded Chicago prosecutors who are determined to get somebody back on death row, because their penises have shriveled to the size of beans," Langford says wryly. "But I'm sure George Ryan is going to take more notice of Nelson Mandela phoning him up and telling him what a good thing he did than a bunch of small-minded little bigots."

If he's not likely to see a sudden upsurge in album sales any time soon, Langford has carved out his own special place in the universe -- which is where that album title comes from. "To be the mayor of the moon would be kind of cool," Langford muses, "but there wouldn't be anyone to lord it over. Me and The Sadies are kind of like that in a funny way; we've got our own little areas that we're like the kings of, but there's nobody there to be impressed."

Jon Langford plays Sat., Feb. 1, 10 p.m., $10, with The Waco Brothers and The Sadies, The North Star, 27th and Poplar sts., 215-684-0808.