Matt Adams wrote this new album in a van in probably half of the states in America, pulling lyrics together as the cops actually pulled him over (“Drivin’ Out Of My Mind”) and figuring out melodies on a ukelele in Baltimore (“Don’t Mind,” which he played that very night) and finally putting it all together on a 8-track cassette recorder that’s got just as many miles as the van by now. So the songs on this album came from a million different places but he puts them together in such a way that they feel like they’ve been together forever, and he calls it Home Away From Home because that’s what he was thinking about when he was looking out the windshield of that van.

One of his friends—taking a break from rehearsing his own band—actually also described his music as a “home away from home for a lot of people.” That’s the kind of thing you say about those rare musicians able to carry their whole world with them, and that’s Matt Adams—part California country and California anglophilia and California rock ‘n’ roll, and though he’s such a natural fit for the San Francisco bay that they should name a MUNI stop in his honor, there’s something in him too of the complete and casual confidence of the Southern California soul surfer—do you know what those are? They’re the ones who surf for spirit, not for sport, and when you think of sunsets over endless water you are thinking like a soul surfer and you are thinking maybe a bit like Matt Adams, too.

He grew up playing open-mics in Orange County, but when he moved up north to the Bay Area he loved it and he’d play everywhere—Rolling Stone found him in a coffeehouse and demanded someone sign him, and he’d put together bands to play bookstores and backyards and beaches and house parties and sometimes even on the bus, and only one time was he ever politely asked to wrap it up. (“Bus drivers seemed to dig it,” he says.) He was glowing with energy; he painted his own album art—and flyers!—and made a cover album of songs mostly by his friends except for one by Dave Davies.

On previous albums, he tempered the loud with the lovable, but now on Home Away From Home, he goes fully and wildly electric—not just because of all that time spent on top of a motor but because the time was right, too. “I’ve played enough kind of happy upbeat joyful stuff,” he says. “Now I’m trying to express that more serious darker side. I’ve always had this album in me. But now it felt right to have it be the next step”

When he recorded this album in a shed behind a house in Oakland, he set up amps and drums and somehow put the individual powers of Ray Davies, Leonard Cohen and John Fogerty all in the same room—he had his electric guitar snarling and sparking over songs about hearts (stopping or beating even harder) and flowers (growing) and cops (who need to get lost) and it ended up as ten songs that can be called timeless in ten years but which were so precise and alive that they’d be at home in any decade since the Telecaster became available for public sale.

Think of Buddy Holly or Neil Young or Joe Ely or Bill Fox or Robert Pollard and now guys like Greg Cartwright—they were born to one day stretch a finger over a fretboard and make something old sound new yet again. And so here comes Matt Adams with more songs in his head at any given time than he can even reliably count—he slid from eighty to over a hundred last time we made him index—and an album of the ten he knew he could connect together to make something bigger than itself. He calls this one Home Away From Home, and he’s right.