Every sound has a say in a Chuck Prophet song. The bass, percussion, rhythm and lead guitars each compete for attention in his tracks, all crying out to be seen as the key hook.

Take but one cut on the new CD: In “Doubter Out of Jesus,” first we hear strings in the distance, setting the parameters of the sound. Then comes a whittled-down fiddle, sketching the particulars of the piece. It’s followed by a bit of clicking, new wave rhythm, setting a pace that’s mirrored in keyboards and a bass. If heard all together in a car, it would nearly force you to break the speed limit.

Prophet has always shown such attention to detail. His albums impress as much with their arrangements as their tidy rock tunes.

He has had time to get the style down.

Prophet first came to attention in the mid-‘80s when he joined the band Green on Red. Though initially known as part of the “paisley underground,” Green on Red expanded to become a solid roots-rock act - a template broadened, and perfected, by Prophet’s solo career.

He has been putting out his own albums since 1990 (nine so far), in between session jobs with everyone from Warren Zevon to Cake.

The songs on “Soap and Water” suggest a more spare Heartbreakers crossed with a shrunken Stones. It’s rock, but told with the intimacy of a ballad. Prophet’s vocals help with the last bit. He’s got a Tom Petty-like hipster drawl, but with more sexy insinuation. Prophet’s new lyrics stress romantic rejection at the hands of an emasculating, or at least exasperating, woman. He’s a tight writer, able to use “freckle” as a verb and to slice his meters into terse bursts.

But it’s really the arrangements that make the songs move. In “Freckle Song,” Prophet makes the rhythm guitar parts cluck and crunch, while a lead guitar keeps taking the melody to a new place. In “Would You Love Me?” the bass steals the show with it own warm tune, playing off a tart guitar arpeggio.

With so many bright ideas knocking around, Prophet should consider not just making records, but producing them for others, too.

Chuck Prophet says Alex Chilton wowed him in the ‘80s.

Chuck Prophet recalls the first time he met Alex Chilton, the enigmatic singer and guitarist late of the Box Tops and Big Star. It was 1986 and Chilton was sharing a bill with Prophet’s then band Green On Red.

“I can remember the ‘72 Buick he pulled into the parking lot with, and he put his amp on stage and took his shirt off and put it in the back of his amp and pulled his gig shirt out and clicked his heels four times, and bang! He was in,” Prophet says by phone from New York. “I just thought he was it. I don’t know who my heroes were at the time, but at that moment, it was Alex. I wanted to be Alex.”

More than 20 years later, Chilton’s influence has bubbled to the surface in a big way on Prophet’s latest solo release, “Soap and Water” (Yep Roc), which showcases Prophet’s skills as a singer and songwriter, with coloring from years of listening to Chilton’s soulful power-pop tunes.

“Alex is a really great guitarist, and he’s also a great blues singer, R&B singer, in the same way that, say, Mose Allison is one of my favorite blues singers,” Prophet says.

The same description applies to Prophet, who has wandered through solo albums, writing projects and addiction recovery in the course of his 20-year solo career

“I spent a year goofing off and trying to do other things, thinking maybe I wasn’t going to make another record,” he says. But a sudden songwriting jag changed his mind, and he soon found himself with 35 songs to winnow into a record.

Soundbites from the performer, on the road, doing what he loves

As he makes his way across Germany—specifically, from Berlin to Hanover—Chuck Prophet is offering cell phone snippets of life on the road abroad.

His conversation isn’t intended to seem like a scrapbook. It’s just that the miracle of telecommunication technology isn’t on anyone’s side this day, regardless of which side of the Atlantic they happen to sit. One moment, Prophet is jubilantly deconstructing the songs—or, more specifically, the inspirations behind them—that make up his fine new album, Soap and Water. The next, the phone line goes dead, to be replaced by a severe recitation in German.

“It’s a brave new world, my friend,” Prophet says when conversation resumes.

The acclaimed San Francisco producer, writer, guitarist and concert artist began forging a devout indie following more than two decades ago in the Los Angeles garage-psychedelic-Americana band Green on Red. But through a solo recording career that began in 1990, Prophet developed an even more expansive pop sound that was as literate as it was lyrical.

In short, he sang a little like Tom Petty, wrote a lot like Tom Waits and rocked with an onstage abandon all his own, as evidenced generously by a string of Lexington concerts after the release in 2000 of his album The Hurting Business.

“It’s my job, as a songwriter, to have my antenna up so I can look around for the right details,” Prophet said. “And to be perfectly honest, I’m not always in the right head-space to wrestle every idea that floats by to the ground. I don’t have that kind of energy.”

Prophet compared the process of crafting an album from the ideas he does wrestle with to “honking your horn in a tunnel until you get bored.”

“It’s like you’re spending your life chasing after this thrill,” he said. “There’s a buzz that comes from writing a song you get really excited about. But the buzz never lasts long. You’re always left wondering where the next song will come from.”

Kelly Willis, the veteran country-Americana artist whose newest album, Translated From Love, was produced by Prophet, says, “Chuck has always been involved when it comes to music. I have always really, really loved and connected with his instincts for songs. He is one of these people that live and breathes music and just instinctively knows what to do with a song.”

Rather than elaborate further on the general discourse of songwriting, Prophet said he’d talk about specific songs he has penned, to offer more exact examples of how his pop smarts take on a tune.

What a great idea. Then the phone goes dead again and a recorded German scolding returns. A third call is placed, and renewed conversation accelerates. After all, another foreign tongue-lashing could break in at any moment.

The first tune Prophet detailed was Doubter Out of Jesus, a Soap and Water song that is a study of conversion more social than religious. It struts to an electric drum groove and swells with, of all things, the support singing of a Nashville children’s choir.

“We were near the end of a recording session,” he said. “Everybody had packed up the drums and basses and everything. A bunch of us were in the control room talking about what the album was missing. So I went through my notebook and pulled this song out. We just jammed on a riff using a drum machine. The whole thing was a freak accident. But when we brought in the children later on, everything went to another level.”

Prophet also was asked to discuss Soap and Water’s finale, Happy Ending.

“I was just fingerpicking around on the guitar on that one,” he said. “I started thinking of it as the closing credits for a movie. I thought, ‘This is great. I have the last song for the album. Now all I need is the first one.”

As varied and curious as the creative process can be in crafting a song, designing a new life for his music every night onstage can be equally exciting. For Prophet, though, the rewards are numerous. Life on the road offers a chance to hook up with a combustible performance persona that his records seldom reveal in full. But there is a personal bonus as well. Prophet’s longtime keyboardist, Stephanie Finch, is also his wife.

“Performance is kind of my addiction, I suppose. But in terms of addictions, it’s the healthiest one I’ve ever had. I’m lucky to travel and hammer things out onstage with Stephanie. There’s always something going on out on the bandstand.

“You know, people are always talking about the (music) industry being in the doldrums, that nobody is buying records anymore. For me, I feel like I’m just getting the hang of this. In that respect, I’ve never been happier.”

Inspiration can come in many forms for the receptive rock musician, but it’s a fairly safe bet that very few of them have ever milked any hit songs from jet lag. Leave it to Chuck Prophet - former Green on Red frontman and longtime solo roots-rock sonic texturalist - to transform an experience that most of humanity attempts to minimize into a creative opportunity.

“When I was touring behind Age of Miracles, I did come back from one of the European tours and I did this thing where I resisted adjusting my body clock so I’d keep waking up at four in the morning which is like noon over there,” says Prophet. “That’s the magic hour, according to the monks. That’s where you’re closest to God right there. And I’d play around with songs at the kitchen table.”

Prophet’s pre-dawn kitchen excursions netted him a trio of interesting songs that didn’t seem to be connected to anything he had worked on previously, so he set them aside. He then took the subsequent year to ponder a life-altering decision - whether or not to continue his role as a working musician.

“I was trying to figure out if there was anything else I wanted to do besides make records and drive around in a van,” says Prophet with a wry laugh. “I couldn’t really think of anything. I demoed some songs with some friends of mine and we got excited about it and said, ‘Let’s just make the record like this, let’s do it.’”

Although some might consider Prophet’s year to be a casualty of writer’s block, it really was just a period of introspection and reassessment, something that he’s done throughout his career. Once he realized that he was meant to continue down a musical path, the songs began to flow freely again and he was well on his way to the completion of Soap and Water, his latest album and first for Yep Roc, his new label.

Oddly enough, Prophet’s lengthy period of self-examination resulted in a group of songs that he characterizes as the polar opposite of that.

“Sometimes, if I look back at the older records, in a way, I remember every last detail, and in another way I look back and think, ‘Who was that guy?’” he says. “So I think maybe these songs might be a little less introspective somehow. I think the world’s come in a little bit more. It’s hard to say.”

For Prophet, there were a couple of points of departure in the creation of Soap and Water. The album was recorded in two locales: first in Prophet’s home base of San Francisco and then wrapped up in Nashville. Veteran roots producer Brad Jones worked on the album all through the process in a co-producer role, a situation Prophet hadn’t opened himself up to for quite some time.

“I met Brad a few times and he got excited about the songs, so he came out and worked with us,” says Prophet. “We thought we would go back to Nashville and work on the back end of the record and I was thrilled to do it. I enjoy myself in Nashville and I have a lot of friends there that I can borrow equipment from and a lot of couches I can sleep on. There’s a kind of strange community where people have come from all over and on the edges of it. Besides country music, there’s a fringe element that’s really pretty cool. I like Nashville.”

Prophet also liked Jones enough to accept him as an outside producer, something he hasn’t embraced in his solo career. As he explains, that notion doesn’t necessarily spring from his unwillingness to work with a producer.

“I used to joke that I was the best producer that I’d ever worked with in my price range,” says Prophet with a laugh. “In Green on Red, I worked with a sideman, and I worked with guys like Jim Dickinson and Glyn Johns and some heavy hitters. And on this record, I wanted to be free to spend more time on the other side of the glass and less time in the control room. Brad Jones ended up being a real complement to my style. I paint with a really wide brush and Brad can get in there into the details and keep me between the lanes, in a gentle way. He’s a no-nonsense Midwestern guy; he’s not one for emotional outbursts.”

One area where Jones was most beneficial to Soap and Water’s eventual outcome was in securing a children’s choir for a couple of the album’s tracks. Prophet had a particular sound in mind and Jones offered what turned out to be the perfect solution.

“I think immediately most people think of gospel singers and I tried to explain, ‘No, I want it more like a high school production of Godspell,’” says Prophet. “The thing about the kids is that was an exact interpretation of what I was hearing in my head. The kids just sing, they don’t try to sound like they’re singing. They just hit the note. They go straight to the note, and they don’t fuck around. They added another level to the record that I really like.”

Although Soap and Water seems to incorporate just about every sonic characteristic that Prophet has explored over the course of his career - rootsy Americana swagger, electronic folk experimentalism, Stonesy blues chug, pop balladeering - he insists that there was nothing overtly preconceived about the songs on the album. As always, Prophet is just doing best what he’s doing at the moment.

“I think that I do have a wide range of feels as a musician,” he says. “Coming out of a country/rock or alternative country reality, I’ve been accused of working in a lot of cross-morphed genres, but it seems pretty normal to me. I think one of the reasons people play country rock is that it’s just really easy to play. My heroes are people like David Bowie; I can only imagine David Bowie driving around in limos in America on one of his glam rock tours and hearing the O’Jays and Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes and saying, ‘Man, we’ve got to do this shit!’ and making a record in Sigma Sound in Philadelphia and just stepping up to the mic and owning it and winning everybody over. I think it’s fun to get out of your bag and out of your comfort zone.”

While Soap and Water clearly exhibits all Prophet’s best qualities as a performer and songwriter, it’s equally apparent that he’s not rehashing old glories or reclaiming old ground for the sake of a new album. Prophet has always been happiest when he’s challenging himself, and that doesn’t look to be changing anytime soon.

“If there was something about a song that I felt was somewhere I’d never been before - it just might be a small detail or a guitar lick or some sort of a figure or something in the lyric or point of view - those are the songs that when I’m writing, I get excited about,” he says. “I think those are the songs I ended up putting on the record. Of course, if you stand back far enough and squint, you’re like, ‘I don’t know, it just kind of sounds like a Tom Petty record.’ I don’t see what’s so strange about it. It sounds pretty normal to me. But in my way, those are the songs that keep me interested enough to wrestle them all the way to the ground. You know, ideas are pretty much free and they’re everywhere and I get them all the time but I don’t always have the energy to turn them all into songs.”

Chuck Prophet, a former member of famed cosmic rock duo Green on Red, has just released his eighth solo album, “Soap and Water” (Yep Roc). The critically acclaimed singer-songwriter recently made his acting debut in the independent film “Revolution Summer” and signed a deal with Chronicle Books, which next summer will release “Shoulda Stayed in School - Road Diaries From the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trenches.” We asked the longtime Duboce Triangle resident for a tour of his favorite neighborhood haunts. (Prophet plays the Make-Out Room tonight).

Golden Produce, 172 Church St. “It’s a family-run produce market right across from Safeway on Market. If you like pears, they carry about eight different kinds. I love the folks that run it - three generations from Cambodia. Golden Produce has got soul.”

Jack’s Laundry, 196 Noe St. “I just adore the woman who runs this laundry. She always laughs when I ask, ‘Which one of you is Jack?’ Aside from the usual dry cleaning, wash and fold stuff, she’s a great seamstress - mends, hems and puts love and care into everything she does. In fact, she hand-sewed each patch on the Green on Red trucker hats. Bonus points for overnight work, too.”

Rosamunde Sausages, 545 Haight St. “Tuesday is burger day. It gets slammed in there and they can get irritable behind the counter if you don’t order properly. So get there early or you’ll be handed a sausage. Wait in the Toronado Bar next door, get a real draft root beer and drop some quarters in the jukebox that’s stocked with ‘deep cuts’ for days.”

Cliff’s Variety, 479 Castro St. “I almost forgot what I came there for: I found myself staring at a unicorn pencil sharpener when a friendly clerk asked if there was anything he could help me with. I was directed to the fabric annex next door and left with a couple yards of Velcro for my pedal board and a spare key for the touring van.”

Peacock Music, 2200 15th St. “Maybe you just want to replace one string on that banjo that never gets played or pick up a bow for your kid’s violin. OK, so you’ll never be Pete Seeger. If all else fails, go on and tune all four strings on that banjo up to one note and play it with a bow. The owner, George, told me recently his church choir could use a baritone singer. I was deeply flattered. Might take him up on that someday.”

Amoeba Music, 1855 Haight St. “In Holland, where I’m touring right now, they’ve turned churches into venues. In San Francisco, they’ve turned one of the last bowling alleys into the Amoeba record store. It’s only the largest new-and-used record store in the nation.”

Philz Coffee, 3101 24th St. “Located in a funky storefront at the corner of 24th and Folsom, each cup of Philz Coffee is ground and made by hand. Phil himself is a real character: an expansive personality, compact, fedora-sporting, mustachioed bundle of energy. You can’t get a latte or a mochachino, but you can get one of the many painstakingly blended combos that Phil has perfected in his 30-plus years in the business. Don’t be surprised if he pulls out a long spoon, turns to one of the gals there, spoon feeds her some foam off the top and says, completely seriously, ‘Don’t swallow it down, swirl it around, make love to it.’ The mint leaf garnish is a nice touch.”

Schauplatz Clothing & Furniture, 791 Valencia St. “I’m a lanky guy. I have what you might call an elongated torso. It’s hard to find jackets that fit. Some days, the thrift store gods are smiling more than others: I found a nice sport coat in there recently, and the fellow behind the counter in his German accent said, ‘Oh yes, very good choice, this just came in, 42 long don’t stay long.’ Their stuff is always clean and wrinkle free. Note to other vintage clothiers: Go ahead and splurge for some dry cleaning. Tack it on to the price if you have to. Thrift stores can be hit and miss. Takes someone with an acute eye to run it. It’s a gift. Some people have the gift. These guys always dig up good stuff.”

P.O. Plus, 584 Castro St. “This is the mailing joint in my hood. It’s a FedEx, DHL, UPS and USPS hub all in one. Ahmad is the man there, a good guy. I like it when I’m done with my packages or whatever, he’ll ring his bell on the counter and shout, ‘Next customer!’ even when there’s no one there.”

El Tonayense taco truck, 22nd and Harrison streets. “Tommy Guerrero turned me on to these guys. I hired them to cater our gig at the Make-Out Room. Yes, you heard right. Free tacos for all my friends! I’m a carne asada man myself, but they do a killer al pastor, which is sort of like a Mexican doner kebab. It’s slow-cooked pork, thinly sliced off the spit with a large knife.”

(****) Back from the Green On Red reunion and studio time with Kelly Willis and Alejandro Escovedo, Prophet has been the much in demand lately. But having long dropped the sub-Dylanisms of his early work, its his solo career thats thriving. Soap And Water is his most satisfying album yet. The range of styles is impressive, from the pale hip hop of Something Stupid to the title tracks murky Southern funk and the swamp-blues of A Womans Voice. But he does the fucked-up ballad thing expertly, too, even drafting in a childrens Christian choir for Would You Love Me.

Chuck Prophet soaks up the Stonesy vibe on his excellent new CD

Though the guitarist’s narco-blasted days in indie-rock band Green on Red are long behind him, there’s still something elegantly and acerbically wasted about Chuck Prophet. This collection of roots rock is Stonesy loose, which is also to say that it’s Stonesy tight. The lumbering A Woman’s Voice aside, Soap and Water’s tracks impress ‹ from the sex-drenched Freckle Song to Let’s Do Something Wrong, where his Tom Petty-ish vocals are puckishly augmented by a kids’ choir on the lyrics “Let’s do something wrong/Let’s do something stupid.” A-

(****) The eighth solo studio album from Californian singer, songwriter and guitarist Chuck Prophet oozes character and confidence. Prophet’s delectable guitar work and world-weary but sharply expressive vocals, along with backing from his own outfit the Mission Express and guests the Spinto Band, ensure that these tracks are packed with rich, flavoursome detail. Brad Jone’s intelligent production has brought a dustily textured finish to the album; this brooding, sun baked sound is the perfect compliment to Prophet’s casually memorable way with words. But despite an overriding sense of direction and coherence, SOAP AND WATER never once threatens to fall back on basic sylistic similarity to keep its twelve tracks knitted together. Each song brings with it a genuine feeling of discovery, from the witty, infectious country-rock opener Freckle Song with it’s irresistible twang and punchy rhythm section, to Happy Ending, a subtly shaded and atmospheric rootsy number that provides a gently philosophical conclusion.

The most innovative moment of all comes with All Over You, a sublime blend of heady dance beats and earthy guitar-based Americana. Led by Prophet’s captivating vocals - nonchalant one minute, exhilarating the next - it layers into the mix a bewildering number of additional ingredients, from ominous strings and twinkly percussive effects to the improbably successful use of a children’s church choir. There is simplicity too; in the form of the dreamy, sinuous ballad Would You Love Me, and its delicate arrangement featuring distant, angelic backing voices and haunting, understated farmonica. A dryly effective female guest vocalist joins Prophet to exchange the clever lyrics of Soap an Water, an angular blues-rock foot-tapper, while taut blues rhythms also form the basis of the intricate but exuberant Down Time, a hugely enjoyable paean to getting away from it all. ‘A woman’s voice can drug you like an AM radio/Like a motorcycle preacher/Like a Sunday far from home’, these vocals warn Prophet on A Woman’s Voice, at times tapping into a near Dylan-esque drawl, The song’s effect is hypnotic, driven by a smouldering slide guitar groove, and its strolling pace builds to a euphoric, bluesy sing-along chorus.

Chuck Prophet’s last solo album may have appeared three years ago - he has since toured Europe with a revived incarnation of his former band Green On Red, collaborated with Kelly Willis and made his cinematic acting debut - but the wait has proved worthwhile. Charming, fiercely imaginative and brilliantly executed, this is contemporary roots-rock of the highest quality. A European tour is planned in support of SOAP AND WATER during September and October, which will surely demonstrate the vitality of these songs in a live setting.

JUNGLE JIM AND THE VOODOO TIGER

Jim Dickinson

Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be. Dwelling on the glories of the past, whatever the decade currently in fashion, pales before the glories of the present with its paradigm shifts and all-access Internet. One thing I do miss in the recent and current decade is “characters”: that is, people who don’t fall into types; folks who by dint of intelligence, mixed with experience and a unique vision of the world, carve out a personal place in it—men like Jim Dickinson.

It would be easy to write him off as a mere roots-rock legend. The legend would start at the Sound of Memphis Studio in the late Sixties, where, with Charley Freeman, Tommy McClure, and Sammy Creason, he formed the rhythm section known as the “Dixie Flyers.” The Flyers moved to Miami, Florida, as the Atlantic Records house band backing such artists as Aretha Franklin, Sam & Dave, and Jerry Jeff Walker. After leaving the Flyers, Dickinson returned to Memphis, and began a producing career, working with Ry Cooder and Big Star. His work with the latter no doubt appealed to later clients like Green On Red, and The Replacements. And, oh yeah, Dickinson recorded “Wild Horses” with the Rolling Stones.

In true “character” fashion, these facts don’t begin to sum up the man. You might be surprised that he studied drama at Baylor University—unless you thought about it for a minute. He has released two solo records before this as James Luther Dickinson, thirty years apart (take that, T Bone). The more recent, 2002’s Free Beer Tomorrow, contains a song, “Ballad of Billy and Oscar,” about an imagined meeting between Billy the Kid and Oscar Wilde, written by the art critic Dave Hickey. Starting to get the picture? Pigeonholing just don’t work here.

Jungle Jim and the Voodoo Tiger continues in the spirit of both the legend and the character. Having raised his own band (sons Luther and Cody Dickinson of the North Mississippi Allstars) he employs them here on a romp through tunes that suit his style. One of the signs of a true character is that they can take a song that has been done to death, like Terry Fell’s “Truck Drivin’ Man,” and inject new life into it—and not just by adding a hardly heard verse. Rarely writing his own songs, Dickinson always includes a Bob Frank tune, here opening with a rendition of “Redneck, Blue Collar,” a vision of the workingman as hard to pin down as James Luther himself. The late Eddie Hinton helps Dickinson and company define Southern soul with his “Can’t Beat the Kid.” Chuck Prophet, one of the few new characters to emerge in the last twenty years, contributes a tender ballad, “Somewhere Down the Road.”

With a voice that is more gruff attitude than mellifluous melisma, Jim Dickinson demonstrates that attitude is enough if you have the goods to back it up. Ask fellow characters like Bob Dylan, Ry Cooder, and Keith Richard—they will testify that the man has the goods in spades.

Chuck Prophet covers a wide range of musical ground on his latest outing. In the opening tracks alone, we go from loud and dirty rock (“Automatic Blues”), to cross-generational Mind Games psych-pop (“Age of Miracles”), to the hip-hop inflected, hyper-melodic nod to the history of pop culture idioms (“You Did”) - which if it doesn’t answer, at least raises many more musical questions, including: “Who put the ram in the ram-a-lama ding-dong?…Who raised the roof and never made a sound?…Who cleared the static and made it sing? You did.” Prophet seems to have a fondness for throwing many different people and various sounds/styles/attitudes together just to see what happens. Dig the transformations throughout a cut like “Pin A Rose On Me.” The magic of such experimentation is no mistake; Prophet knows what he is doing. The results are enchanting, particularly the Spector of Wilson that drives a tune like “Just to See You Smile,” or the lilting groove of “You Got Me Where You Want Me.” I never did believe in miracles, and I’m beginning to wonder why.