Cody Diekhoff is Chicago Farmer, who sounds something like a downhome version of the late folksinger-songwriter Steve Goodman. On Flyover Country, his sixth studio album, he turns to a fuller sound than formerly, though resisting the temptation to sprint off in a radical direction.

Here he joins forces with the Austin rock outfit Band of Heathens, a collaboration that works except when the two sides feel they need to remind us that the Heathens are fully able to rock out. This unfortunate impulse is most evident in the bombastic last third of the sole non-original of the 10 cuts, Hank Williams's intended-to-be pensive "Ramblin' Man." Instead, when the arrangement veers out of control, it just feels dumb.

The good news is that Diekhoff is a warm-hearted soul who manifestly likes others, though he wraps the sentimentality in wry humor. He's most fond, one infers, of ordinary people's imperfections and limitations, about which he writes amiably, not sparing his own. None represents that outlook more happily than "Dirtiest Uniforms," employing a wonderfully fresh metaphor that celebrates the virtue of trying hard even when the odds of your succeeding fall between slim and none.

The song "$13 Beers" gently puts down celebrity culture while putting in a word for that part of the music industry -- namely, the fringes thereof -- where you'll find the likes of Diekhoff (he also name-checks Robbie Fulks and the Bottle Rockets) and in whose audience the beer is only four bucks a pop. "Deer in the Sky" details the situation of an Illinois country boy (presumably Diekhoff, who did grow up on a farm) who fears flying but who appreciates that the conveyance he's sitting in has no chance of colliding with the animal cited in the title. As another resident of the rural Midwest, I can only nod in shared relief. I don't go so far as to fly from the problem (not to be wished on either deer or car), but I do make a point of staying off country roads at night.

The title song is serious in intention but opaque in meaning. If I were to surmise, I'd guess it's about the rich, complicated lives we who dwell here lead, while the coastal types who use the phrase unironically remain oblivious to if not actually contemptuous of our existence. Or maybe that's not what he means at all. I suppose it's for us to figure out.

All I know for sure is that if we Midwesterners aren't any smarter than anybody else, we aren't any stupider, and we may be less consumed with thoughts of our own importance. The Midwest that Chicago Farmer conjures up is as close to the real one as you're going to hear in song.