Irish-American rock band Black 47 will be at Twin River Friday night.

Larry Kirwan, the singer and chief songwriter of the Irish-American rock group Black 47, often records albums based around a theme: 2004’s New York Town was a look at his current hometown after Sept. 11; 2005’s Elvis Murphy’s Green Suede Shoes was a companion piece to his memoir. And Iraq, which comes out next month, is about just what it sounds like.

Specifically, it’s a clear-eyed look at the war through the eyes of American soldiers, and it’s based on the firsthand impressions and recollection of Black 47 fans who have gone to war and kept in touch.

KIRWAN SAYS the band has a mainly blue-collar following, with lots of servicemen and women (as well as police officers, firefighters and the like). And the relationship Black 47 has with those fans — the band hangs at the bar before and after their shows instead of retreating to a dressing room, and Kirwan says it’s not unusual for the band to ask from the stage for advice on where to party after the show — meant that Kirwan got a lot of firsthand news about the war.

“We got a lot of e-mails about what was actually happening,” Kirwan says, and that led to the songs “Downtown Baghdad Blues,” which was recorded on Elvis Murphy, and “Southside Chicago Waltz,” which made it onto 2006’s Bittersweet Sixteen. But as the war and the contacts went on, “we decided to buckle down and write a full album. . . . There’s nothing really cohesive written from the point of view of the troops over there.”

While Kirwan is foursquare against the war, he says that the military fans of the band run the range, and many viewpoints are represented on the album.

“It’s by no means people saying ‘We hate it over here.’ No one particularly likes being there, but a lot of people joined through patriotism. . . . Occasionally, you get one from someone who’s over there saying ‘I don’t agree with this point of view you’ve given,’ and you write back to them and say ‘Well, listen to this song, and this song’ — send them an mp3 — and they write back and say ‘Well, you’ve got a point. I still don’t agree with it, but thanks for writing it anyway.’ . . .

“I tried to deal with it from their point of view, which is non-ideological — just trying to do a job. Some of them don’t want to be over there; some of them are there because of 9/11 and how that was manipulated. It’s a complicated subject. And jeez, it’s the subject of our times. It’s less about why am I writing about and more about why aren’t more people doing it. It’s a dramatic situation.”

“Stars and Stripes” is the tale of a dying soldier that rages against the “chicken hawks” who sent him there. The lovely ballad “Ramadi” focuses on the insecurities of a soldier far from his love (“I’m thinking about you, baby/ Pinned down behind a wall in Ramadi”). “We all doing our part back home/ We’re spending up a storm down on the farm,” Kirwan spits in “The Last One to Die.”

“THE BATTLE of Fallujah” is a riveting portrait of the ambiguity of the soldier’s lot. “The Hajis and Qaeda were holed up inside of/ The mosques and the booby-trapped shacks/ But the U.S. Marines/ Put a dent in their dreams/ Sent them halfway to hell and back” goes one verse; “Here’s to the old men back in the States/ Don’t ever let on that they used you/ When you’re knockin’ down doors for them DC whores/ Kicking ass at the Battle of Fallujah” goes the chorus. In other words, the hell with everybody.

“Downtown Baghdad Blues” and “Southside Chicago Waltz” are re-recorded here. The former is a similarly matter-of-fact look at the job of keeping alive (“Me I don’t care much about Jesus or Muhammed/ They don’t stop bullets to the best of my knowledge”) and the latter obliquely features the band itself.

For the past 14 years in the band’s 18-year history, Kirwan explains, they’ve played an Irish festival on the South Side of Chicago on Memorial Day. Kids who started going there at age 8 or 9 are now in their mid-20s and serving in Iraq, and when Kirwan was writing the song (which refers to hearing Black 47 in the park and yelling out for one of their songs) he was thinking of one Chicago fan in particular.

“IT’S KIND of a tragic situation,” Kirwan says, “because when he came back he didn’t write for a long time. I kind of wondered about him, because he’s very intense and was writing to me from over there — he’s very much a supporter of the war. [Finally] he wrote to me to say that when he came back, he didn’t fit in. So he got a motorcycle, drove across the country and was now heading back to Iraq.

“It really struck me — apart from the 4,000 dead and the 20,000 wounded, the war is deep into the American psyche at this point, and it’s not really getting that recognition.”

Kirwan cites exit-polling data from recent presidential primaries that places Iraq down the list of the most important issues facing the nation. Part of it is that no candidates are offering a strong enough antiwar stance, he says, and part of it is that he recognizes something he saw in his native Ireland: “an acceptable level of violence. People got basically used to the fact. . . . As long as it’s three or five a week, and not 30, you get blunted to it. And the album, in its own small way, is to bring home what this is all about. This war is not about supporting the troops and putting a yellow ribbon on your car. It should be about ‘How do we get them out of there as quickly as we can?’ ”

Kirwan says the plan for the band hasn’t changed: “The usual Black 47 thing — get out and keep playing. We make a living from being on the road.” And it’s gotten easier to do this material than when some of it was first written.

The band started doing these songs in 2003, right at the beginning of the war, and Kirwan says that it was a rough slog at the time. “Sometimes I would think ‘I’m going to give this thing a break.’ . . . It was really rough in the first year, two years. There was 80 percent approval of the war, so even people who were on your side were staying quiet. And you’re doing it and the fingers are being shoved in your face, and people are walking out and complaining to the owners of places. The amount of hate mail — unsigned, always, of course — was just unreal. I used to dread opening my e-mail in the morning.”

September 2005 was a turning point, Kirwan says, and for the longest time he couldn’t figure out why. Then someone hypothesized that it was because of the stand of Cindy Sheehan, the woman who lost a son in Iraq and camped out in Crawford, Texas, demanding to speak with President Bush about it. “The war became a lot more personal because of what she did,” says Kirwan, who wrote “Ballad of Cindy Sheehan” from her point of view after meeting her and put it on Iraq.

Nowadays, when he’s belting out about the “chicken hawks” who sent the dying Johnny to Iraq in “Stars and Stripes,” there are “no fingers in the air. Some fists in the air, but no fingers.”

Lots of service members still come to the gigs, Kirwan says, “And even if they don’t agree with what we’re doing song-wise, they come because we are doing it. They feel validated, when they get a couple of drinks. It’s their story.”

Black 47 play tomorrow night at the Lighthouse Bar at Twin River, on Twin River Road in Lincoln, at 9 p.m. There is no cover. Call (401) 723-3200.

Lyres in town

You never know exactly when or where Boston garage-rock progenitors The Lyres are going to pop up again, but this time they’re at Jerky’s, 71 Richmond St., Providence, tomorrow night at 9 in an $8, 18+ show with The Midnight Creeps and The Viennagram. Don’t give it up now!

rmassimo@projo.com