A voice from another era

Last year at a Club Passim gig, Tom Brosseau reminisced about his early days striking out as a singer-songwriter. Just a few years prior, he said, he had released an album and had extra copies he wanted to sell. So he took an old-fashioned approach and decided some door-to-door salesmanship might be the best route.

It was a simple plan. He'd arrive at a house with acoustic guitar slung over his shoulder, ring the doorbell, and when someone answered (usually a woman), he'd politely introduce himself and say that he'd like to sing a song. Without asking, he would launch straight into a romantic ballad he wrote called "Yodeling for You," complete with a high-lonesome yodel on the chorus.

Doors shut. CDs went unsold. And Brosseau soldiered on with empty pockets.

But it was their loss. If only his would-be patrons could have heard the whole song, they probably would have invited Brosseau in, where he could have regaled them with his delicate songs about life on the road, nostalgia, loneliness, and his plan to "grow a woman from the ground," the title of one of his early tunes.

Brosseau, who opens for Múm tomorrow night at the Somerville Theatre, has always seemed plucked from another era. You can hear it in his music, an after-hours concoction of dusky Americana and singer-songwriter rock, and certainly in his voice, a lithe, androgynous tenor that has perplexed more than a few newcomers.

From his albums, you might expect a female folk-blues singer, but instead you get a tall 30-something man with a genteel demeanor courtesy of his North Dakota upbringing, and a tan and crest of wavy blond hair courtesy of California.

"I'm glad people like my voice, but I wouldn't want it to overshadow the songwriting, which I work really hard on," Brosseau says last week from his home in Marina del Rey, Calif., , where wildfires raged just a few hours away.

Still, it's impossible to overstate his voice's delicate beauty, which sounds nothing at all like other famous male falsettos such as Jeff Buckley or Elliott Smith. If anyone can coo like a nightingale, it's Brosseau.

Cindy Howes certainly remembers being taken in by his voice. Howes was a host of WERS's folk radio show back in 2002, when she first heard one of Brosseau's records and became obsessed with it. She helped Brosseau set up his debut show in Boston.

"I think his voice is what initially gets your attention, but the more you listen to it, the more it becomes part of the whole package," Howes says from Pittsburgh, where she's now a morning radio host. "It's really the details that make a Tom Brosseau song. He can write about details that you and I would never think to write about."

On the strength of a brand-new album, "Cavalier," Brosseau is finally getting the recognition that has eluded him. Not that he hasn't been trying: Since 2004, he has released six official albums, but "Cavalier" is his best.

The album is a return to the sound that first gained Brosseau an audience, based on "Late Night at Largo," his online-only album from 2004 that has become a fan favorite. Recorded live at the LA club Largo, it sounds exactly as you might imagine: "No audience, one microphone - the chairs were put on the tables, the waitresses and staff clocked out, the lights were turned down, a little traffic on the street, some people walking by on the sidewalk. The songs were performed to an empty room," Brosseau writes on his website.

"There was a thread there at Largo that I didn't pull through," Brosseau says. "With 'Cavalier,' I decided to move in a different direction that gets back to the sound I started with."

Brosseau calls "Cavalier" a deeply personal record, "apocalyptic," even. His previous album, "Grand Forks," was all about the flood of '97 in the Red River area of his North Dakota hometown, so he was eager to look inward for his latest.

It's the sound of a man lost in nostalgia, turning to memories to figure out where he's going. The album's intimacy starts with Brosseau's songwriting, but the overall sound of the record is just as important. John Parish, a composer and performer known for his work with PJ Harvey, produced the album, with an obvious respect for Brosseau's words and voice and how they sound recorded.

"What really made an impression on me was the first time I saw him perform live, at the Cube in Bristol [England], a small arts cinema that also puts on live shows," Parish writes in an e-mail. "I was really struck by his voice and general presence in a way that I hadn't grasped as strongly from the recordings."

It was a mutual admiration. Brosseau sought out Parish after hearing "How Animals Move," his 2002 album notable for its elegiac aesthetic. For "Cavalier," the two took a light approach. As opposed to, say, a Daniel Lanois production, Parish's fingerprints are so faint they're practically invisible. He subtly distorts Brosseau's voice on "Committed to Memory," and twinkling piano interludes imbue "My Heart Belongs to the Sea" with an ethereal aura.

"I wanted to capture that unadorned, intimate, engaging aspect that Tom is capable of showcasing live," says Parish. "So we recorded the songs as bare as possible, then, because a record is obviously different to a live show, I just added stuff so there were a few layers that people might discover over several listenings. But the first impression should really be one man and a guitar talking to you."