Andy Cabic's music does not sound like anything you'd hear on Majic 94.1.
It's about as far from the BeeGees and the Supremes as you can get. It's more Nick Drake than Fleetwood Mac.
At the end of the day, though, Cabic is preoccupied with crafting a song that will make you listen to it once, then want to hear it again and again.
"I'm a fan of good pop songs. There's some tension in it. It's got good arrangements. It's the kind of song that if it was a 45 you'd want to pick the needle up and play it again," Cabic said. "I'm more concerned about harmony, melody, a catchy song. That's where I enjoy putting a record together."
Cabic, a northern Virginia native who moved south to attend college at UNC Greensboro, will return to North Carolina tomorrow with his band, Vetiver, for a show at the Werehouse. The group's newest album is Tight Knight, a collection of dreamy, sunny-day guitar finger-pickin' and bittersweet ballads from a group whose style has been called spacey folk, rustic folk, freak folk, pysch folk and even balmy folk.
Cabic knows those associations and allusions are out there. But they're not how he would define his music. "I think there are so many branches and cul-de-sacs off the tree of folk music today, that I don't typify my music in that way. It's a mixture of happenstance and tweaking and playing my instrument and seeing what happens."
Vetiver revolves around Cabic, who has made it a habit of bringing in different members or having friends pitch in when he thinks a song needs a particular sound. On past albums, contributors have included Joanna Newsom, Devendra Banhart, Hope Sandoval of Mazzy Star and Colm O Ciosoig of My Bloody Valentine.
Cabic couldn't resist that kind of tweaking on Tight Knit, too, asking Jonathon Wilson, a musician who lives near Los Angeles, to play the Clavinet on "Another Reason to Go." It makes another appearance on "At Forest Edge." The Clavinet is an electronic keyboard with a distinctive staccato sound popular in a range of reggae and rock (think Captain & Tennille's "Love Will Keep Us Together," but also Bob Marley's "Concrete Jungle").
It upped the funk. "The timbre, the bite of that kind of keyboard," Cabic said, fit with the song's lyrics lamenting "no good job, no good town, no roots planted down, why be lost when you could be found by another reason to go."
"It's more like, with each year, I met different people," Cabic said. "If a song needs something, I think about who I know."
Cabic met two Vetiver-mates in Greensboro -- Sanders Trippe and Brent Dunn. Trippe sings and plays guitar, and Dunn plays bass on Tight Knit.
When Cabic lived there in the mid-1990s, his band, The Raymond Brake, toured with Chapel Hill icons, Archers of Loaf, and had a similar noisy, garage-rock style -- different as day is to night to the quiet songs he writes now, which Cabic explains by a shift in musical interests.
He graduated in 1997 after studying political science and English, then moved to San Francisco in 1998.
And perhaps he took part of the South with him in other ways? "I don't know. I'm polite," he said during a recent interview by phone. "I like the cuisine. I love collards and okra. I moved in with an apartment of people who I knew from North Carolina. They still live here.
"I remember living in Greensboro feeling a new sense of relaxed pace of things," he added. "I think I kept that with me as I moved out West."
Cabic has not laid back on work, though. Tight Knit is Vetiver's fourth full-length album in five years, and its first on the venerable Sub Pop Records. It was released in February, and the band has been on the road steadily all year.
On the bouncy, charming "More of This," Cabic sings, "I wish I had more of this, less to miss, now is the right time … it won't be long before I have to leave knowing that I could use more time alone with you that might just carry me through." He likely speaks with experience.
If you go
Vetiver will play Friday at the Werehouse, 211 E. Third St., with Distrails and Jews and Catholics. Admission is $10. Doors open at 8:30 p.m. For more information, call 722-3016 or go www.krankiescoffee.com. To hear some of Vetiver's music, go to www.myspace.com/vetiverse.
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