Nick Lowe likes to keep things simple these days.

Nick Lowe titled the career-spanning compilation he released earlier this year Quiet Please, and it ain’t false advertising. The softer, sadder, more introspective country-soul phase Lowe commenced with 1994’s The Impossible Bird now comprises the entire second half of his recording career, one that’s been decelerating (though not eroding in quality) for some time. 2007’s At My Age was his first disc in six years, and he’s released no new music since.

So perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise that his avuncular, agreeable set at the Barns of Wolf Trap Sunday night was closer to a song-for-song reprise of his show at the Birchmere two years ago that it ought to have been. Take out the grilled and chilled salmon salad and sub in one new tune — which Lowe preceded with a funny if unnecessary apology that was longer that the song itself, another sad-sack she-done-gone called, amusingly, “I Read a Lot” — and it would be the same concert. Once again, “People Change” kicked it off, “The Beast in Me” shut it down, and in between came 18 of the most casually devastating, immaculately performed little two-to-three minute pop songs one is likely to hear in 2009 (or 2007, or 2112).