You might say that AM is an artist who brings together the best of all possible musical worlds, rippling through classic roots sounds -- AM pop and rock, obviously, and English Invasion stuff, or steamy soul/R&B persuasives and more and more of late the aerified melodic athletics of Brazil’s post- bossa nova tropicalistas.

Yes, you might say that, but putting it that way, one risks sounding kinda corny. That is, a lot of musicians pay lip service to having a plethora of farflung musical “influences,” but then you listen to their music and it sounds like they’ve done their best to avoid them at any cost.

Future Sons & Daughters is a cornucopia of head-turningly unusual sonic colors and shapes that manage to stamp themselves on one’s psyche like they’ve been there all one’s life. Yet these songs are footsteps into unknown territory, like a tantalizing glimpse at a promising future-pop. “A Complete Unknown”’s peppy, heavily reverbed jaunt along a minor-key melody and twangy guitar has the slapback vocals like the Sun Records and John Lennon of old, and a peculiarly resonant way of being upbeat and lost in reverie at the same time.

Recorded and produced by Charles Newman, who’s worked his magic with Magnetic Fields, among others, Future Sons & Daughters is really a full flowering of AM’s singular gifts, as a guitarist, for sure, and as an arranger with an almost uncannily great taste in the fresh refashioning of a vast host of musical sources. The recording involved a very strategic use of vintage guitars, amps, mics and mixing console to give AM’s moody heartbreakers a warmly inviting sound that wouldn’t attack the ears so much as seduce the listener into repeated plays.

“Most of the time the ideas will come to me as a basic melody, and when it hits, I grab it. I record everything I think of into this little tape recorder. This time, once I had a group of songs together, I started working with Charles Newman in his Silverlake cottage, which incidentally was one of Elliott Smith’s early dwellings. The vibe was great in this place.”

A guitar player, singer, multi-instrumentalist and startlingly gifted songwriter, the Los Angeles-based (Echo Park) AM in sum is a fresh-eared maker of great, new pop music amid whose considerably varied skills you’ll always hear a lot of just plain old funky soul. Could be he absorbed a lot of that when he was growing up in New Orleans.

“I’ve been playing guitar since I was a kid, like 13, I guess,” he says. That’s the age when AM moved with his family from Tulsa, Oklahoma. “Our house had lost value; then my dad lost his job. It was a real low point for all of us in the family because we'd lost everything; when he found work in New Orleans, it was time to move. My dad put us up in a little town called Mandeville, right outside of New Orleans.”

So on Future Sons & Daughters it’s AM’s very personal brand of soul we’re talking about, and while it’s a relief that he doesn’t affect soul styling as such in his vocals, his affecting croon is without a doubt a soul-satisfying thing to hear.

AM also was picked as a Julian Lennon "Pick of the Week" for the track 'Temporary One'