"It's fun when you do these tribute records; you can f--- around with somebody else's song, and kinda beat it up," says singer-songwriter Chuck Prophet from his San Francisco home. Within the hour, his side project with wife Stephanie Finch, Go Go Market, will be in a local studio squaring off with Sandy Denny's "I'm a Dreamer" for an upcoming Denny tribute album. The band has actually worked with the song in the past and abandoned it, but Prophet isn't concerned. "You don't have to go into it like you're sending one of your babies off to the Charles Manson daycare center. You can actually dare to fail."

Prophet's bold approach isn't restricted to his interpretations of other people's songs. On his latest album, The Hurting Business, he subjected his greasy roots rock to some "hip-hop way of thinking": loping beats, sturdy grooves and even DJs. Not exactly the kind of fare you'd expect from a respected Americana artist.

Prophet got his start as the guitar-slinger in the mid-Eighties California-cowboy outfit Green on Red, but when it looked like that band was heading out to pasture at the beginning of the following decade, he stepped up to the mike. On a handful of solo albums that culminated with 1997's Homemade Blood, Prophet cultivated a potent brew of rock, country, folk and blues. Quite the raconteur, Prophet's noir-ish tales, delivered in his brooding tone, struck a chord with the emerging alt-country crowd.

But it's his eloquence with a guitar that's gotten him into rock's inner circles, with appearances on albums by Kelly Willis, Cake and Warren Zevon, as well as remixes of hits by Smash Mouth ("All Star") and Len ("Steal My Sunshine"). It's the latter type of extracurricular work, he admits, that may have steered him in the direction of his new album. "I guess I'd gotten turned on to this culture because I'd been playing on these remixes and I became a bit enamored with their process," he says.

Prophet was overdubbing some guitar on a remix for his neighbor Jacquire King when he decided to play him some four-track recordings he'd been collecting for his next record. "A lot of these were just beat box, home organ and acoustic guitar," he says. "I was pretty shy about them. And he said, 'Wow, that's a song, man; you're halfway there.' That's all I needed to hear."

Dumping many of these skeleton recordings into a computer, Prophet and King used them as a foundation and built on top of them. This cut-and-paste method is a far cry from the recorded-live-in-the-studio approach of Homemade Blood, but Prophet is leery of making too much of the process, or the occasional breakbeats and scratches that punctuate the album.

"It's kind of subtle and it makes for a better headline than it does a jarring listening experience, because I'm still a slave to song craft," he says. "I'm still a slave to structure in a traditional way. I just try and take it and turn it sideways and make it a little unconventional. I think that's my job."

Although The Hurting Business features moments of "sideways" songwriting, as Prophet himself assures, there is nothing on it that requires an owner's manual to navigate. With its mesmerizing snare beat, baying harmonica and sleepy vocal, the opening track, "Rise," is perfect accompaniment for a late night drive down a desolate stretch of highway. "Dyin' All Young" is a balmy ballad built around a sample from rapper OC's "Born to Live." And East meets West in the swirling mellotron and twangy guitar of "God's Arms."

But while Prophet's songs may be spellbinding, the process of writing them holds no measure of magic for him. "It's all kind of boring and lonely, and I kind of hate it," he says. "I'm always kicking something around but occasionally I just get engaged in something and I wrestle it all the way to the ground. And then I look around and I go, 'Man, somebody turn the light on around here! What time is it?'"

MICHAEL ANSALDO
(February 9, 2000)