Tim McGraw throws a dirt road party at PNC Bank Arts Center

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This good-natured gunslinger had a microphone in his holster.

Tim McGraw tucked it into his pants at the hip; his hands free, he led thousands of fans in a slow clap. McGraw was smiling, but his stance was pure "High Noon" -- legs apart, shoulders back and chin forward, ready for the showdown. Smooth like Wyatt Earp, he drew the silver-plated microphone and fired off another rousing chorus. The job done, the cowboy thespian pantomimed a brush of dirt off of his shoulder.

For two decades, Tim McGraw has been making simple gestures play large. He scored his first smash in 1994 -- the dreadful "Indian Outlaw" -- and he's barely stopped since, topping the country charts a remarkable 24 times. His songs are neither innovative nor challenging, but because of their muscular choruses and their clean-lined clarity, they're tough to resist. If country music is increasingly encroaching on commercial territory once held by rock, perhaps McGraw is a frontiersman after all.

When last he sang in the Garden State, McGraw told his backwoods stories to a crowded Meadowlands football stadium. He was the co-headliner of the wildly successful Brothers of the Sun tour with Kenny Chesney. McGraw's Sunday night show at PNC Bank Arts Center in Holmdel demonstrated why Chesney was eager to get his drawing power on the bill: The amphitheatre was packed, and the lawn, too, was crammed with fans braving the humidity in their cowboy hats. McGraw's appearance was cheered like the return a reliably heroic sheriff who has collared a public enemy. Nothing about his two-hour concert was the least bit risky or surprising, but that was hardly a problem. With McGraw, there is never the slightest worry that you'll get anything but what you paid for.

He shares more with the island-hopping hedonist Chesney than it initially appears. McGraw does not promise the Caribbean to hard-working middle Americans (although a few of his songs do detour to Mexico), but he sells an escapist fantasy nevertheless. In the world McGraw creates through his music, the grass of the country is green and lush, the crops are popping in rows, the highway always means freedom, a farm is something like a party, and the distant riverbank is still a place where a man might elude the observation of the authorities. In longstanding country tradition, McGraw drops a few place-names, but his vision of the idyllic rural isn't regionally specific. As America continues to pave itself over, and turn itself into a place where every act is overseen, McGraw's vision is immensely reassuring.

He plays it to the hilt. McGraw gets rhapsodic about the barbecue stain on his t-shirt at the county fair; ask him if the life he wants is a little too country, and he'll reply "truck, yeah!" Even the biggest fan is likely to concede that this can be corny. The star gets away with it because his hits -- "Something Like That," the singalong "Felt Good on My Lips," and "Live Like You're Dying," with its spine-tingling modulation, all of which were concert highlights -- are so ingratiating. McGraw's theatrical skills are also an asset, as is his distinctive stage demeanor. While the members of his outstanding eight-piece band are in frantic, and occasionally joyous, motion behind him, the star surveys the stage like a man on horseback. His movements are often slow, deliberate, and considered, each invested with storytelling purpose.

McGraw can get excited: when the band was roaring, as it was on "Real Good Man," he hopped up and down like a kid skipping rope. But the power ballads -- and there were many of them -- got the full benefit of his pacing. During a strong performance of "She's My Kind of Rain," McGraw raised his hands to the sky to bring down the patter of drops on his open palm. He was assisted by the video footage of rain that played on the bandstand behind him. Even if the special effect hadn't been there -- and this concert was pleasantly low on gimmickry -- he would have still managed to generate the illusion.

The country singer is touring behind "Two Lanes of Freedom," his twelfth album and latest country No. 1. It will not be remembered as a classic. But it is much more relaxed than "Emotional Traffic," the personal set which preceded it, and for a singer who is more comfortable as an actor than he is as a confessor, it's a step in the right direction. McGraw devoted a mid-show stretch to material from "Two Lanes," which was probably his biggest risk of the evening. He backed up the mid-tempo "Nashville Without You," a tribute to country music, with the Henley-lite melodrama "Friend of a Friend" and the torch song "Highway Don't Care," a duet with Taylor Swift. (Swift appeared via video screen, as did Keith Urban, who takes the guitar solo on the song; it is an indicator of Swift's estrangement from the country audience that Urban got a much bigger hand.) He followed this with the title track -- a song as dull as a drive through the Llano Estacado. This was an uncharacteristically meditative stretch, but it seemed to lose him no listeners.

Elsewhere, McGraw played straight to the Garden State crowd, praising Springsteen and the Cake Boss with equal fervor, and, several times, introducing his lead guitarist as a local. The lyrics to "Southern Girl," another new song, were changed to "Jersey Girl;" it is a testament to the generalities and romantic platitudes in McGraw's material that this caused no friction. But that's what he's there for -- if, as his gruff-voiced support act Brantley Gilbert argues, country must be countrywide, the style needs storytellers who can look beyond the particulars of Nashville life and convince city slickers that they've got a little cowboy in them. The image of that cowboy may be straight from the movies and the outlaw adorned with the greasepaint of the stage; nevertheless, those archetypes are powerful ones, and speak directly to a genuine yearning.