The back cover of his new album, “Soap and Water”, pictures Chuck Prophet in hipster-bohemian uniform (bedhead hairdo, canvas sneakers) haunting an empty laundromat. It’s a fitting image for his songs of poisoned love, in which every rake inevitably gets his lonely comeuppance - even Elvis Presley, who watches his female fans toss him their undergarments only to tell himself, “They’ll forget me when I’m gone.”

Singer and songwriter Chuck Prophet has been ahead of the curve since his days with the devilishly cagey Green On Red. His latest solo album, the delightful Soap and Water, is another dance away from anything obvious, done so casually that he makes originality seem simple.

Prophet is the ultimate alternative hybridist. He uses rock ‘n’ roll as a foundation, tossing in tricks and treats snipped from all manner of musical genres. Smart arrangements play with cliches - orchestras, children’s choirs - yet somehow remain original, big and sweeping, embellishing the songs instead of overpowering them.

The heart of Soap and Water is Prophet’s skill as lyricist. He is a manipulator of metaphor and novelistic detail, a master at the art of making unease seem soothing through his congenial singing and wry, subtle sense of humor. Understatement has rarely been overstated so well.

Chuck Prophet’s seventh album arrives after 12 years as a solo artist, peaking with his 2002 “adult alternative” single, “Summertime Thing.” This go ‘round promises to raise the San Franciscan’s profile even higher, as he raises the bar with a mix of blues (“Automatic Blues”), funk, psychedelic pop (“Age of Miracles”) and country rock.

Prophet’s signature drone tumbles out Lou Reed - ish poetic ramblings on “You Did (Bomp Shooby Dooby Bomp),” while wife Stephanie Finch lays down retro vintage keyboard parts. The combination is wistful, like someone mulling over the events of a long night in the city’s dark watering holes while riding a near-empty late-night bus home. Players hail from Nashville, San Francisco and points between, creating an album that’s crafted, modern and full of fine writing and melody, but not without its roots.

Valley Fever - Green On Red Live at the Rialto

“Downwardly mobile ambitions” - that’s how writer Fred Mills described the music of Green On Red, the Southwestern band that became an underground sensation in Europe during the eighties. The band was among a handful of progenitors of the eclipsed “desert rock” sound, which blended elements of country with a frenetic, edgy guitar sound a la Neil Young.

Starting in 1980, the band released 11 albums, toured relentlessly, and experienced immense burnout throughout a 12-year career that included its share of lineup changes, business squabbles and drug/alcohol addiction. Singer, guitarist, songwriter Dan Stuart could be the poster child for musicians stuck between cult status and overblown celebrity.

Valley Fever is a serendipitous document of a one-off reunion of the group paying tribute to drummer Alex MacNicol, who died in 2004. Stuart and his mates Chris Cacavas (keyboards), Chuck Prophet (guitar), and Jack Waterson (bass) enlisted the help of some Brazilian tourists with video cameras to film the show. Surprisingly, the film work is first-rate. Instead of the standard shaky-cam shots that more often show the stage lights than the band, the turistas.com cameras capture extraordinary frames of the members that show grudging appreciation of each other and at other times facial expressions that indicate the opening of old wounds from being on stage again.

The focus is on Stuart, Prophet and Waterson as they jam with casual abandon while Cacavas and hired gun Daren Hess on drums are the subjects of two shots while they pound out some spiritually energizing rhythms throughout. As with any film, it’s the small details that really make the characters stand out, and Valley Fever has a number of moments that illuminate us into the group’s dynamic. Among the best are Stuart grabbing and mangling his lyric cheat sheets after each song, and foisting them gently into the audience, as if they were dry tumbleweeds being carried off by a dusty wind.

Musically, the band is brilliant. Green On Red was never known for theatrics or technical precision, instead plying a sloppy, self-deprecating style that heightened the bands’ status as rock anti-heroes. Anyone familiar with the band knows Stuart hates live performances, especially in theatres. Yet, his hatred of performance enhances the lazy attack of guitar chords that solidified his reputation in the first place. Prophet plays against Stuart’s minimalist approach with some shrapnel-spewing lead work accompanied by Waterson’s lively bass. This mélange supporting Stuart’s lachrymose words leads to an exalted concert experience.

While Mills was spot-on about Green On Red’s “downwardly mobile ambitions”, Valley Fever proves why the group surpassed its own expectations on a path littered with eighties bands that never found their potential. While the Rialto concert is a fitting tribute to a fallen comrade, Valley Fever is homage to what Green On Red might have been.

Chuck Prophet has come a long way from his “paisley underground” years as a lead guitarist for Green On Red with whom he recorded eight albums. Age of Miracles is his seventh solo effort and the musical territory Prophet explores here has, again, widened from the country/rock area he hailed from since his musical beginnings to soul, funk, hip-hop and industrial noise. Prophet as the producer of the album, the main guitar player and the singer and songwriter could not have put his signature down more clearly, but co-producer Eric Drew Feldman (Captain Beefheart, Frank Black, PJ Harvey) has certainly not just been another fiddler on the knobs. He helped to drag Prophet out of a creational and inspirational impasse and added some crucial sounds on his Moog synthesizer on a couple of tracks.

The general mood on Age of Miracles shows a certain gloomy likeness to Static Transmission, the 2003 album of another ex-paisley undergrounder, Steve Wynn (The Dream Syndicate). Both musicians have matured into independent, individualist musicians who almost never do what you expect them to do. With this release, Chuck Prophet continues the path he has chosen with The Hurting Business (2000) and No Other Love (2002), at the same time carefully trying to avoid repeating himself. The outcome is an album that is hard to fall in love with immediately, but that if you continue to play it nevertheless, suddenly seems to creep up behind you and hit you over the head with all its might and nastiness. This effect has a lot to do with the arrangement and the production that are “subliminally mean” rather than straightforward: something evil is hiding under the surface and you can’t smell it right away.

The same is true for the lyrics.

Sometimes I feel so alive/ I wish I was dead, Prophet growls in the opener “Automatic Blues” against a backdrop of blazing horns. There is something terrifying in the air, something that you feel listening to Iggy Pop’s The Idiot or Lou Reed’s Berlin.

Lou Reed’s presence is hovering throughout whole album including the title track, a sluggishly moving song with heavy string arrangement (Jason Borger) and female backing vocals (provided by Prophet’s wife Stephanie Finch):

The night is gonna crush the day

Once it was the other way

We hope that you enjoy your stay

In the age of miracles.

Prophet is accompanied on pedal steel in “The Smallest Man in the World” and it sounds good, but it’s a song with a weird lyrical twist underlined by Feldman’s piano playing that seems to quote from Newman’s “Little People” ­ know what I mean? “Whatever he does, he’s the smallest man in the world” and that is not good news.

“Just to See You Smile” continues in the Lou Reed groove, but this time with an almost Phil Spector-like orchestration complete with booming bass, glockenspiel and a whole girl choir. Prophet immediately wipes the smile off any listener’s face with “West Memphis Moon,” the tragic story of the West Memphis Three, three young men who were convicted for murder of three boys in 1994, one of them sentenced to death, even though the evidence was, to say the least, questionable.

There’s a melancholy country feel about “You’ve Got Me Where you Want Me,” a duet with Stephanie Finch co-written by Kim Richey. Richey also contributed to “Baby Pin a Rose on Me,” which turns out to be about an abusive relationship:

You saw a light

I saw a freight train coming

I tried to tell you he was no damn good

You heard bells, I heard the hammer falling.

He ran you down like I said he would.

“A man’s strength is on the insidebut you better be careful with this stuff,” Prophet warns in “Heavy Duty,” a weird and frightening song (co-written with D. (Dan?) Penn), that sounds like Depeche Mode in their darkest period battling it out with Doug Sahm.

The closer “Solid Gold” (again featuring Stephanie Finch on vocals) is another song reminiscent of Lou Reed’s Berlin-period, with a very soulful, delicate string arrangement.

I wanna raise a toast to everyone

to my friends near and far

I wanna raise a toast to stand up men

Wherever you are

I wanna raise a toast to you my love

For putting up a fight

Then I’m gonna raise my glass again, for you and you alone

on this star- crossed night.

I drink to that. Not every song on Age of Miracles is equally convincing, but it is an album that will make you feel as if you have just been crushed by a truck. That’s not a feeling you want to have every day, but sometimes it helps to make you enjoy every day life a little bit more.

He made his first blip on the roots-rock radar as the guitarist with Green on Red, an early ‘90s alt-country band that fell apart just as the genre was gaining traction. Seven solo albums later, the California-bred singer-songwriter has become a bit of a critic’s darling; scoring the opening slot on Lucinda Williams’ tour last year certainly helped his cause. Like John Hiatt and Ron Sexsmith, Prophet’s one of those not-easy-to-categorize talents whose passion for sonic experimentation has him throwing all kinds of styles into the mix. His latest CD, Age of Miracles (New West), is grounded in the same country/folk soil as his other records, but with a distinctly quasi-psychedelic vibe. Here, Prophet melds literate pop-rock with country-roots realism, wah-wah guitars, blues riffs and sometimes sandpapery vocals. Wildly divergent, yes, but wonderfully so.

Once during a live performance, Ryan Adams regaled the audience with a Bob Dylan tour story, introducing the story’s original author, Chuck Prophet, as a “classic dude.” Take Mr. Adams as you like, but that description fits Prophet perfectly. Not only does it suit the man, whose wry humor comes through in even the straightest of songs, but it also is exemplified in Prophet’s seventh album, Age of Miracles, which even with its slick studio production manages to sound as classic as any classic rock. It’s flat-out good music, much of which will likely sound as good years from now as it does today.

Many have long felt that the former Green on Red member has been slighted by the listening public. A generally well-reviewed artist who has steadily produced albums since his 1990 solo debut, Brother Aldo, Prophet remains in relative obscurity, despite that his sound is relatively accessible. The irony is that his albums are getting progressively better. He includes some quirky elements, such as some unusual instruments and the occasional incorporation of hip-hop-sounding beats, but he manages to pull it off with out it sounding like a shtick.

With a Clapton-esque nasal vocal delivery, Prophet croons pure pop romance in “Just to See You Smile” and “You’ve Got Me Where You Want Me.” His quirky humor shines on the enigmatic character sketch in “Smallest Man in the World.” Showing his versatility, he turns to the more sinister narrative of “West Memphis Moon,” a dark, bluesy modern-day murder ballad. And he successfully explores the unrequited love a loyal friend and would-be lover in “Pin a Rose on Me”: “It’s the same old, sorry song and dance/ You’re always good for one more chance/ You saw a light, I saw a freight train comin’/ I tried to tell you he was no damn good.”

Though for someone with a reputation for guitar work, Prophet gives us little display of his prowess. He instead uses an unusual panoply of slickly layered instruments (Glockenspiel, frequently impressive pedal-steel guitar courtesy of Max Butler, harpsichord, Echoplex, and Moog), relying on electronic effects to carry his clever lyrics in this unassuming success.

“There’s winners and there’s losers and I’m caught between the two,” mourns Chuck Prophet in a rare self-pitying moment from Age of Miracles, his seventh and strongest album.

It is surprising that bitterness and regret don’t feature more prominently in the songs of this San Francisco-based singer-guitarist. With 20-plus road-years behind him – first as guitar-slinger with roots-punks Green on Red, for the past 14 under his own flag – Prophet is a qualified rock’n'roll veteran. And yet he has enjoyed neither the mainstream success his smart, tough songs and Tom Petty-crossed-with-Elvis looks should have earned him, nor the cult worship assigned to more naturally marginal figures like Will Oldham or Daniel Johnson.

But Age of Miracles finds him too engaged with the present to worry that he has never received his due. Though he remains a son of 60s rock, referencing everything from the drawl of Dylan’s Highway 61 to the orchestrations of the Beatles’ Abbey Road, he is also taking advantage of the same technology that allows hip-hoppers to create their contemporary cut-and-pastes.

Call it laptop rock. It’s a fusion that Prophet began exploring a couple of albums back. But if the turntables and sample-scapes of 1999’s The Hurting Business threatened to push Prophet’s meaty guitar right out of the frame, on Miracles he gets the balance just right.

On “You Did” he loops drums and weaves vocal samples into an electronic tapestry, without losing his grip on the fundamentally rock’n'roll question: “Who put the bomp in the bomp shooby dooby bomp?” And on the opening cut he stacks up the saxophones of Tom Waits’s erstwhile sideman Ralph Carney to re-inforce a crunching riff worthy of Exile-era Stones.

Prophet’s reconciling of digital technology with the rock’n'roll spirit is echoed in his website (http://www.chuckprophet.com), where he keeps an occasional log. Here, as he travels from one scungy gig to the next, he shares pearls of received wisdom (fellow journeyman Nikki Sudden cautions him, “I never drink coffee. Keith Richards told me that’s the absolute worst thing you can put in your body”), along with a droll commentary of his own. “I remember once getting bumped up to first class,” he muses as he boards yet another plane. “I didn’t want the flight to end … In first class you get the feeling that even if the plane crashes, first class will just keep going.”

And his songs are laced with the same droll humour. My favourite couplet on Age of Miracles: “I feel like a pair of sneakers in a washing machine/I’m bouncing off the walls, trapped in the heat.”

And yet if there’s a prevailing mood to Miracles, it’s one of gratitude – for small mercies, narrow escapes and, above all, good love. He lays out his theme in “Heavy Duty”, co-written with Dan Penn (composer of the ultimate ode to loyalty, the Aretha Franklin classic “Do Right Woman”) and again in the album’s closer, “Solid Gold”. In these songs, Prophet the rocker does not dissolve into sentimentality as a less mature artist might. He simply views his life from a perspective in which all the rocking and rolling is only made meaningful by the relationship that remains when the music’s over. In these moments you understand why there may be more important things to Chuck Prophet than winning or losing.

Former member of alt-country godfathers Green On Red and musical experimenter deluxe Chuck Prophet’s second album for New West, Age Of Miracles, came out a year ago but is definitely worth a quick re-visit. Building on the hippety-hoppy, funked-out, rocked up, smoothed-down grooves of his last knock-out release, No Other Love, Prophet and “long-suffering wife/bandmate” Stephanie Finch (along with keyboardist Jason Borger, Red Meat alum/pedal steel whiz Max Butler, four bassists, five drummers, a beatbox and a programmer) gleefully continue to break all the rules here.

The lyrics at first seem deceptively simple-straight-forward love songs or story-songs or thematic current event songs or dark, cosmic-surfer songs-but upon closer listen, one finds Prophet to be among the rarest of song-writing talents: One who’s able to meld the sage observations of the omnipotent Outsider with the painful, all-too-human declarations of what he calls “... the smallest man in the world ...” to create tunes that let the listener both peer autonomously into fascinating tales and simultaneously experience the emotions of the subjects thereof.

He probably nails his own wonderfully twisted psyche and gloriously original oeuvre best in his own words: “All roads lead to Dylan I suppose, beyond that, if I mention one influence I’d have to leave out a hundred. One definite influence on this record is my increasingly acute awareness that we’re living in the modern age. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not about to throw my laptop into the river any day soon. I’d probably end up developing some kind of a tic without it. There’s just no time. No time to daydream, even less time to think. Fast food express lines, meth?paced TV, medications marketed to women who ‘have no time for yeast infections’ (as if the rest of us have the time). Genetically cloning the family pet, prescription miracle drugs, mad cows, madder scientists ... watch those carbs! The psychosis! On second thought, I wouldn’t have it any other way.” Neither would we, Chuck. Neither would we.

That’s it for this time ‘round, ‘Dial-heads! Tune in next week for a few more New West reviews, and don’t forget to kick Old Man Time in the ass for Tommy this New Year’s Eve ... Until next year-make yer own damn news.

Of all the artists on this list, perhaps there’s no one harder to pigeonhole than Chuck Prophet. On Age of Miracles, the under-acclaimed fretter builds upon his typically folk- and country-rooted sound with some curveballs. He begins, for example, with barroom scorcher “Automatic Blues,” then glides into 1970s psychedelic clouds with a smile-inducing title track that came 35 years too late to become a hippie anthem.