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Jersey City’s Brennan Courthouse, with its stately marble columns and lofty domed ceiling, seems an unlikely venue for live music. But because county executive Tom DeGise is an avid folk music fan, the building turns into the Brennan County Coffee House once a month, featuring a variety of folk performers as well as an open mic. And who better to perform there than Jersey City musician Tris McCall, who writes and sings about Hudson County politicians?

The courthouse — filled with cocktail tables and folding chairs, with surprisingly rich acoustics — makes a surprisingly intimate “coffee house.” Playing a Korg electric piano, dressed nattily in sports jacket and collared shirt, Tris performed to a small crowd of family, friends, and fans on Friday night, Feb. 12, and did not disappoint.

Tris’ engaging vocals always sound like he’s telling stories, and his theatrical piano style adds dynamics and emotion to the proceedings. His set list included a song about his then-Congressman, “Robert Menendez, Basta Ya!” — which, as Tris explained, isn’t so much about the Menendez himself as the experience of voting for him in heavily Latino Union City, where McCall lived at the time he wrote the song. Other political songs included the dreamlike “The Ballad of You and Me and Brett Schundler,” which references the former mayor and failed gubernatorial candidate, and “The Ballad of Frank Vinieri,” which tells the story of the rise and fall of an ordinary citizen who’s “weighed in the balance and found wanting” by the dog-eat-arena of politics. “They called me a degenerate, a criminal, a whore,” Tris sang. “I ask you people, what’s the Democratic Party for?”

McCall recently released his fourth full-length album, Let The Night Fall, and showcased several of its songs, including the hometown reminiscence “Mountainside” and the rambling, witty, epic “First World, Third Rate,” a digression on the Garden State’s obsession with fast food and the places where we consume it. “Not too many in here now except for me and the flies, and a little brat who’s crying ’cause he got mustard in his eyes,” Tris sang. “His dad is scraping it off the back of the bun with a butter knife … It’s all so deeply horrible, it’s great to be alive.”

The title track, “Let The Night Fall,” falls into the realm of Tris’ political songs, with its hopeful reminder that Obama’s America remains very much a work-in-progress, and that our 300th anniversary seems “uncouth” to Old World Europeans. “Meeting halls and public houses rise up over the Schuylkill, where minutemen jump back and feign surprise when they get the tax bill,” he sang. “They said ‘you sing so well you could mend the Liberty Bell!’ But if you’re tired of this old one, we could start a new nation, you and me, just like they did in 1783.”

Not every song referenced politics, though. A bit of a surprise came with a cover of Tim McGraw’s “I’ve Got Friends That Do,” a song about the strength of Christian faith and community that McCall sang sincerely and without a hint of irony.

In his recent annual Tris McCall Critics Poll, in which he invites fans and friends to rate the previous year’s music, (available at www.trismccall.net), Tris goes on at some length about the vagueness of popular bands like Phoenix, whose hit song “1901” makes absolutely no sense at all. In front of a live audience, Tris discussed how it’s considered vogue these days to “art up” your music, but asked “what would John Prine say about this? Would John Prine art up his lyrics?” With that, he premiered a new song called “We Don’t Talk About Teddy,” which he promised would be as direct as he could be. The song examines the pain and miscommunication in a failing marriage, but the identity of Teddy — a dead child? A son away at war? — remained as much of an enigma as anything in the obscurantist oeuvre of trendy acts like Animal Collective or Passion Pit.

Even when he’s writing folk songs, Tris McCall leaves you thinking.

Tris McCall: “The Ballad of You And Me And Brett Schundler”

Tris McCall and his band will be appearing at Maxwell’s in Hoboken on Friday, March 5, with double-breasted, Prosolar Mechanics, and Hey Tiger.