I first heard Alan Singley at the after party for the first PDX Pop Now in 2004. He was sitting on Larry Crane’s back porch singing and playing the guitar for a bunch of happy, exhausted people. The song he was playing (and, it turns out, simultaneously writing), These Trees Are For Resting, ended up on the following year’s PDX Pop comp.

Alan had moved to town not too long before from Florida and has since rapidly made his way to the center of the vibrant musical community that surrounds inner Southeast record label, Lucky Madison; two of the label’s mainstays are his regular sidemen (LM’s goto engineer Gus Elg and labelmate Leb Borgerson).

Alan aptly describes himself as Portland’s Burt Bacharach. He combines Bacharach’s best qualities with Portland’s: his songs are catchy, well-crafted, personal, and often shambling. His most recent collection of them, Lovingkindness is his best. The record is split between raucous numbers with the full band that emphasize the catchy and shambling side and quieter more personal acoustic songs that show off Alan’s pop virtuosity.

In the two unreleased tracks I have for you today, both recorded since the completion of Lovingkindness, Alan seems to have finally synthesized all of these qualities together:

• Alan Singley - Sitting Silent
• Alan Singley - It’s OK When It’s Just You and I

Sonically riskier than his past work, these two songs feel both more intimate and more confident. “Sitting Silent” features his most adventurous arrangement to date, with worbles, stomps, and angelic female vocals augmenting Alan’s quiet singing and and sparse piano. “It’s OK When It’s Just You and I” is an incredibly ambitious composition with lush instrumentation, many contrasting and interchanging parts, and Alan’s best ever recorded vocal performance, especially during the peak of the song (at about 2:15), which gives me chills every time I hear it.

More links:

• Get Lovingkindness from the recent LA-transplant label, Slow January
• Alan Singley on MySpace

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