Music

IT'S TEMPTING TO cast Kelley Stoltz as a mysterious lone gunman of a singer-songwriter or the archetypal bedroom multi-instrumentalist who materialized from out of nowhere. Tempting – but wrong, because Stoltz's progress has been slow, albeit stealthy. Witness his gorgeous second album, Antique Glow, which first appeared around Sept. 12, 2001, as a self-released vinyl pressing of 100 copies, with Stoltz's hand-painted covers fashioned from recycled thrift-store record jackets.

"I was lucky enough to be one of the first few people to have a vinyl copy of it," says Rob Douglas, the bassist for Chuck Prophet who once shared a flat with Stoltz. "I started making calls right after that, started asking friends, 'Have you heard this guy? It's just amazing.' " Prophet asked Stoltz to open for them, which eventually led to Antique Glow being released on CD by Australia's Corduroy in 2002 and by San Francisco's Jackpine Social Club in 2003.

Though lacking the vinyl's handmade art, the CD still radiates homespun warmth. Sequenced for listeners with rangey music collections and short attention spans, it streams rock, blues, music hall, and folk stylistic flourishes; shimmers with bells, drone, and ping-ponging sonics; and occasionally lunges into a psych-stomp. Stoltz's amazing voice gently drifts over it all, sounding high and lonesome drenched in fuzz ("Perpetual Night") or low-down and croony ("Listen Darkly").

So what rock did the 33-year-old Mission District dweller crawl out from under? The Detroit suburbs, where Stoltz was reared on a diet of long, cold, and boring winters, choir practice, high school cover bands – and counterculture legends of San Francisco, psychedelics, and Black Panther meetings, courtesy of his photographer stepfather. After a stint in New York City working as an intern for Jeff Buckley, Stoltz decided to start writing music himself. After another stop in Detroit, he and a drummer friend piled into a Dodge Neon and drove west in '95.

The pair began playing in their basement and, within a year, were coaxed to perform at the Tip Top. It was a quick step from there for Stoltz, then teaching at the Kittridge School and impatient to capture the sounds in his head, to begin to pummel his friend's drum set himself and record his first lo-fi CD, The Past Was Faster (Telegraph Company, 1999).

Eager to spend more time writing music, he next eked out a living, pre-eBay, picking the best records at Mission thrifts. "I was the guy that made you always say, 'Why are there only Barbra Streisand and Barry Manilow here?' I was in back, and I grabbed all the Count Five, Seeds, and Leonard Cohens," he recalls, counting the ways he'd bribe the staff to get at the 50c vinyl, which he would collect or resell for $5 or $50. And Antique Glow reflects a bit of that recycle-reuse-compost mentality, making a tasty mulch from mostly '60s folk, psych, rock, and garage leavings.

Now completing an album on the cycle of a relationship, in addition to the second installment of his loving re-creations of the Echo and the Bunnymen catalog, Stoltz is basking in the afterglow of attention from the U.K. – England's Beautiful Happiness recently released Antique Glow to radiant reviews from publications such as Mojo. "I'm really flogging a dead horse here, but it's neat that I can still listen to it and think it sounds good," he marvels humbly at his Capp Street studio, adding that he'll likely tour the country in January. "Just getting to actually go to other places in the world, because of some little song that you made up in your room." (Kimberly Chun)