With his excellently gritty rock-soul debut, Rewind (out today), Ricky Fanté has channeled a generation of old-school soulmen -- from Sam Cooke to Otis Redding. Rewind's coolly retro appeal also earned Fanté a job impersonating Wilson Pickett on the Sixties-based NBC drama American Dreams.

"I can't lie to you -- I didn't know his stuff real well," Fanté says. "But from what I understand, it was a pretty good depiction. And I got to do the James Brown splits on TV."

To date, however, Fanté's most notorious performance took place at a San Diego naval base, when he was serving a four-year stint in the Marines. "This was the third phase of boot camp, so you could grow a bit of hair," he says. "It just so happened that the drill instructor saw me in the bathroom, brushing my hair and singing a New Edition song. He made me stand in front of the entire platoon and act like I'm brushing this little piece of hair and sing New Edition's 'If It Isn't Love.' After that, the drill instructor would always call me Slick Rick."

Once Fanté got out of the Marines, the Washington, D.C., native moved to Los Angeles to see if he could make it as a singer. "When I got off the plane, I had six bucks on me," says the handsome twenty-six-year-old. "I had a buddy with an apartment in Hollywood. It had more roaches than carpet."

After working as a messenger and entertaining seaside crowds in a funk band called the Soul Surfers, Fanté (a decent surfer, he says) eventually signed with Virgin Records and paired up with songwriter Jesse Harris, who penned "Don't Know Why" for Norah Jones' smash debut.

"We have enough D'Angelos already," Fanté says. "So [Jesse and I] dug in the crates of old classic Stax albums. We wanted to recapture that sound."

They did well enough to impress legendary Shaft theme-song maestro Isaac Hayes, who collaborated with Fanté on an as-yet-unreleased remix of "It Ain't Easy," Rewind's first single.

"Isaac really embraced the sound -- he thought he was listening to good old Muscle Shoals soul," Fanté says. "He took me under his wing and told me what it means to be a soul singer."