You might say that Tulsa-born and New Orleans raised AMis an artist who brings together the best of all possible musical worlds, rippling through classic roots sounds — AM pop and rock, obviously, and English Invasion stuff, or steamy soul/R&B persuasives and more and more of late, the melodic athletics of Brazil’s tropicalistas. Yes, you might say that, but putting it that way, one risks sounding kinda corny. That is, a lot of musicians pay lip service to having a plethora of far-flung musical “influences,” but then you listen to their music and it sounds like they’ve done their best to avoid them at any cost.
   
AM’s newest album Future Sons & Daughters (Filter U.S. Recordings), is a cornucopia of head-turningly unusual sonic colors and shapes that manage to stamp themselves on one’s psyche like they’ve been there all one’s life. Yet these songs are footsteps into unknown territory, like a tantalizing glimpse at a promising future-pop. The peppy, heavily reverbed jaunt along a minor-key melody and twangy guitar of “A Complete Unknown” has the slapback vocals like the Sun Records and John Lennon of old, and a peculiarly resonant way of being upbeat and lost in reverie at the same time. It’s the distant guitar twang and tinkling piano doubling on the verse’s vocal melody of “The Other Side” that establish the song’s connections with classic American roots sounds. On “Darker Days” it’s all string-sheened Philly soul, so pensive, sweet and slightly sad. An instrumental tribute to AM’s idol Jorge Ben pays indirect homage to the great Brazilian tropicalista, yet is remarkably free of bossa nova-type clichés.


With the memorable choruses and surprising bridges of the chimes-sprinkled “Leavenworth” or the acoustic guitar and organ laced “When the Dust Settles,” we know by album’s end that we have just experienced the art of delightful pop song construction. Listener, stop to savor how AM keeps every instrumental break short and interesting, too, where each song is continually repainted in different colors; that has the effect of extending the emotional terrain, whether with mandolins, strings, synth, trumpet or funky old hollow-body guitar.

AM’s debut album, 2006’s Troubled Times, was named one of the best indie albums of the year by iTunes and from which every song was culled for use in movies and TV shows, such as HBO’s “Big Love,” ABC’s “Brothers & Sisters,” and MTV’s “The Hills.” An EP of duets titled Side By Side- Duets Vol. 1 was released in 2008 – you might have heard that on your last visit to Starbucks, ‘cause it’s on their playlist.


Recorded and produced by Charles Newman, who’s worked his magic with Magnetic Fields, among others, Future Sons & Daughters is really a full flowering of AM’s singular gifts, as a guitarist, for sure, and as an arranger with great taste in the fresh refashioning of a vast host of musical sources. “Most of the time the ideas will come to me as a basic melody, and when it hits, I grab it,” explains AM. “I record everything I think of into this little tape recorder.”

Once the songs were fleshed out, AM finalized their shape by jamming with Newman, before he and his band hit the studio, where they layed down the bass, drums and rhythm guitars in two days.

“The band really delivered on this album,” he exclaims. “Before we got together to go over the songs I made everyone in the band a hand-picked playlist of everything I had been digging on in the last year: obscure Italian soundtracks and Brazilian music, psychedelic Turkish folk, deep cut soul and groove. Incidentally Mark Getten, my bass player, had started to take lessons from Carol Kaye (who played bass on The Beach Boys Pet Sounds among a slew of other classics) so he was already expanding his skills. The bass was so important on this record as it really defines the groove. I tried to push Mark out of his comfort zone a bit.” Chris Lovejoy’s conga playing was equally as essential and Jesse Nason’s multitude of synths and organs give the record its moody overtone. Butch Norton (of Eels and Lucinda Williams fame) laid down the drums.

A guitar player, singer, multi-instrumentalist and gifted songwriter, the Los Angeles-based (Echo Park) AM in sum is a fresh-eared maker of intelligent, new pop music amid whose considerably varied skills you’ll always hear a lot of just plain old funky soul. Could be he absorbed a lot of that when he was growing up in New Orleans. “I’ve been playing guitar since I was a kid, like 13, I guess,” he says. That’s the age when AM moved with his family from Tulsa, Oklahoma. “Our house had lost value; then my dad lost his job. It was a real low point for all of us in the family because we’d lost everything; when he found work in New Orleans, it was time to move. My dad put us up in a little town called Mandeville, right outside of New Orleans.”


While Tulsa has its own fine line in great American country and rock roots traditions (J.J. Cale, Leon Russell), turns out that moving to Louisiana was the best thing that could have happened to AM, artistically and creatively.

While in high school one of the more definitive moments for AM was when he started working at a music store in neighboring Covington, Louisiana, where a lot of the acoustic and bluegrass scene regulars would gather and play, and from whom AM took guitar lessons. “It was a great expander for me, because I was pretty much into rock and roll in high school, but then working in that store opened my eyes to a broader palette,” he reveals. “Later when I moved to New Orleans to go to college (Loyola University), I was thrown into the groove world, jazz, R&B, soul, and all of that stuff started to weave its way into my palette.
 “I think that’s when the soul and funk bug got me.”

As a songwriter, AM shows impressive skill at the old-fashioned craft of pop composition. Not to sound pompous about it …
“Song-structure wise, I’m still a pop writer — though the definition of pop is so elusive,” he says. “I just respond to the ‘60s and early ‘70s. I grew up on my father’s record collection of ‘60s-‘70s pop and rock, and that stuff was just perfection in my eyes. In recent years I’ve become much more interested in what was going on all over the world in that era; it was just such a fertile time. I came to find some of the most mind-blowing music I’ve ever heard, from countries like Brazil, Germany, Italy, even Turkey.”

It was in college that AM dove into R&B, soul, funk. “I’d see Maceo Parker whenever he was coming through town, and guys like Walter Wolfman Washington in New Orleans – just total groove, funk, dirty soul, and that’s still some of my favorite music to listen to. I do the best I can to put what I’m listening to into my own music but, obviously, I’m not a soul singer.”


So on Future Sons & Daughters it’s AM’s very personal brand of soul we’re talking about, and while it’s a relief he doesn’t affect soul styling as such in his vocals, his affecting croon is without a doubt a soul-satisfying thing to hear. He ultimately, conveys the comforting heart-tug of a simple pop song sung with sincerity, not irony, and he takes you by surprise at the pop form’s infinite capacity for expressive reinvention. One inescapably comes to the same conclusion: This is such intelligent stuff, and it all just feels so good.