Looking back, moving forward

But Derby isn't after anyone's seal of approval. "Tusk," a subversive soft-rock album marked by a collision of the sweet and the menacing, was more than anything the sound of a band imploding -- which, not coincidentally, is exactly what happened to the Dambuilders. Derby's own producer told him that he was shooting himself in the foot by using "Tusk" as an aesthetic template for his new album, "Even Further Behind." The collection doesn't have a niche. It's so many things, not quite focused, awfully in between.

Mission accomplished.

"I've been trying to do this album for years," says Derby, on the phone from New York. "It feels more realized than anything I've ever done. This is the kind of record I would have made if I had been the fascist leader of the Dambuilders."

As the title suggests, "Even Further Behind" is bittersweet. Derby is perpetually looking back, slipping down into memories, letting go of the past with the painstaking care of a 37-year-old

former-almost-rock star forcing his hands, finger by finger, to loosen their grip. "Once I was in love with my illusion," Derby sings on "The Dream Is Over," a Lennon-esque ballad. "Once I was in love with my pain/Once I was in love with my one true love/I don't think I'll ever feel that again."

He's grappling with time and place, but Derby is anything but disoriented. He reflects on misspent love, wasted years, and derailed plans not wistfully but wisely -- in measured tones and easy tempos that suggest a musician who's finally ready to relax into his own voice. "Now that the dream is over/I finally feel I can sleep," goes the song's coda.

The Dambuilders released seven albums during the 1990s, and the group's boundary-blurring clash of sounds -- raw noise, striking melodies, tender and screaming vocals, sly wordplay -- made them critical darlings and rising national stars. The band split up while on the road in 1998, victims of their own disillusionment.

"When you're younger, you're racing against time," Derby says. "In the Dambuilders we felt like we needed to accomplish this or that right away. We were disappointed with the way things were going. That was partly the cause of our undoing. When you're older, you're not in such a rush."

With the exception of "You're My Plus One," a jarringly frantic flashback, the songs on Derby's disc lope along, breeze by, and amble. Derby, who moved from Boston to New York in the late '90s to be with his now wife, is having a serious love affair with what he calls the avocado Mafia bands: Warren Zevon, Jackson Browne, and a clutch of other deceptively laid-back, savvy singer-songwriters who sprang out of the '70s LA music scene.

Like theirs, Derby's songs are lovely and sincere, but there's an all-important edge to the earnestness, a wry subtext to the easy listening. His version of the California dream includes a nervous breakdown. At first the song "Boston" sounds like a gently strummed bit of nostalgia -- the singer finds a photograph of an old friend, recalls hanging out on Harvard Street -- but it turns out he just wants to know what went wrong.

"Brooklyn" is a gauzy jumble of melancholy and hopefulness that brings to mind indie-pop band the Pernice Brothers -- whose bassist Thom Monahan coproduced "Even Further Behind" with Derby and former Eve's Plum guitarist Michael Kotch.

"Dave and I are very similar in our appreciation of that in-betweenness," says Monahan, who also works behind the board with So-Cal country-pop combo Beachwood Sparks and indie-rocker J. Mascis. "He's a great singer, a beautiful songwriter, and he made this album to please himself. He made an album that he's going to want to listen to in 20 years."

Kotch has been Derby's musical and business partner since the Dambuilders broke up. They both played in British singer-songwriter Lloyd Cole's band, and two years ago the pair formed Derby & Kotch, a commercial music production company that Derby describes as "mostly what I do." Recent projects include the aforementioned television theme and music for several pilots -- among them "Unfabulous," a Nickelodeon children's show on which the pair is collaborating with Jill Sobule.

"It's not so different from when the Dambuilders were on a major label and our lives became more and more about writing for the 10-second tests that radio stations use to choose songs," says Derby. "Except now we have 30 seconds. When I took a break from music I went to graduate school [at NYU's New Media program] and worked as a tech consultant. The commercial music work is like doing tech and being a musician, a consultant, and a designer all at once. I try to see what people want and come up with a solution that makes them happy."

Despite the nasty breakup, Derby is still on good terms with his former bandmates; Dambuilders violinist Joan Wasser (now recording under the moniker Joanaspolicewoman) and drummer Kevin March both appear on "Even Further Behind" as well on as various Derby & Kotch projects. March became a full-time member of Guided by Voices last year. Guitarist Eric Masunaga, who cofounded the Dambuilders with Derby, now runs the Cambridge-based record label Sealed Fate as well as a multimedia sound mastering studio.

Derby is quick to point out how proud he is of the witty, decadent noise-pop they made.

"We had our own sound and style of doing things, and that's fragile," Derby says. "We thought we understood what it meant to be on a major label, but part of what it meant was eroding what we were doing. Breaking up wasn't a bad thing. We've all gone on to do interesting solo stuff that we wouldn't have done otherwise."

For all the changes he's embraced, Derby hasn't let go of his fascination with geography. The Dambuilders never completed their 50 Songs for 50 States project

Log on to www.boston.com/ae/music to hear audio clips from Dave Derby's new CD, "Even Further Behind."-- Derby estimates they wrote about 25 and recorded 15 -- and it's important to note that Derby is changing his topographical focus, writing instead about cities ("Boston") and boroughs ("Brooklyn"). "Pretty soon I'll be writing about my navel," says Derby, who grew up in Hawaii and says his fascination with place is typical of the Hawaiians' sense of rootlessness. "But, yes, I do think [the narrowing of focus] is symbolic. It's also symbolic that I'm using my given name instead of hiding behind a band name. I wanted to remove that level of artifice.

"Someone up in Boston wrote that most people make the best music of their careers when they get older and the industry doesn't perceive them as viable. I think there's a lot of truth to that."

Joan Anderman can be reached at anderman@globe.com.