The rock and roll life stories we're accustomed to hearing, especially in regard to artists who've enjoyed brief but spectacular runs on the charts, are the melodramatic ones, about fast rises, quick slides, overexposure, overindulgence, rip-offs and regrets. Singer- guitarist-songwriter Jim Keller - co-founder of Tommy Tutone, the San Francisco band whose "867-5309/Jenny" has been one of the most enduring and entertaining artifacts of the early eighties - escaped any sort of Behind The Music-style fate. He didn't burn out or fade away. He grew up. Sunshine In My Pocket, his first solo effort after more than a decade away from performing, is the evidence: an album of easygoing soulfulness and often heart-tugging honesty, combining ruefulness, humor, romantic longing and more than a little wisdom in a 12-song set that is also - no surprise here - catchy as hell.

In its sound and its arrangements, Sunshine in My Pocket has more in common with Memphis-style R&B than with Northern Californian new wave. Keller, who is now based in New York City, juggled schedules and studio time over two years and assembled an impressively eclectic roster of players. Among them are guitarist Marc Ribot (Tom Waits, Elvis Costello); singers Dawn Landes and Syd Straw; R&b-gospel trio the Holmes Brothers; Ollabelle keyboardist Glenn Patscha and bassist Byron Isaac; and drummer Steve Goulding (The Rumour). The album was produced by Keller's long-time friend Dave McNair (Los Lobos, Alejandro Escovedo) and Hector Castillo (Brazilian Girls, Roger Waters). Keller, whose voice has deepened and matured, balances the intimate with the outgoing: some tracks, featuring generous helpings of R&B-style horn charts, were inspired by live jams he organized with various musician friends once he'd started to play again; others were crafted in more solitary fashion.

"Some of the songs were written with the bar band in mind," Keller explains, "but a lot of them I wrote in my apartment in Brooklyn, sitting around with my acoustic guitar while my wife and daughter were sleeping, so they're more personal. It's one thing to play a song with the band, another to make it work with just voice and guitar. When you're writing, to have faith in the simplicity of a tune without having everything else going on ? that's tougher." Keller started out gigging at roadhouses, grange halls and bars in Northern California, playing to "hippies, red necks and cowboys." He'd been raised in New Jersey, but moved to Vermont shortly after high school before deciding to head west. As he recalls, "I was a pedal steel-playing, guitar-playing, hippie carpenter. Then I moved to California with my pick-up truck, my table saw, my guitars, my dog and my girlfriend. I got out there in 1974 and that's where I started to write and play. Tommy Tutone was really my first band. Tommy Heath and I met. I was too shy to stand up in front, he wasn't, and we both figured there was a mutual need. I remember we played one gig and someone said, put on sunglasses and a tie and 'you're new wave.' It worked."

Luckily for Keller, he didn't get too new wave: as extant youtube videos attest, he dressed simply and sharply back then - more Joe Jackson, say, than Devo. In fact, Tommy Tutone was new wave by default. Much like British pub rockers Elvis Costello, Rockpile and Graham Parker and the Rumour, Tommy Tutone was a superior bar band, blessed with instantly likeable original songs, mostly written by Keller. The band drew serious major label attention from Warner Bros Records, with whom it did a demo deal, and Columbia Records, where the group eventually signed. Tommy Tutone was filed under power pop ? one of those bands whose work managed to fit on Top 40 and FM rock but still pass muster with the skinny-tie set. The band's 1980 debut yielded an almost-hit, "Angel Say No," but it literally struck gold with 1982's Tommy Tutone 2, featuring "867-5309 (Jenny)," which Keller had co-written with Alex Call of Clover. The song has achieved the status of a genuine eighties anthem; to this day, it's practically mandatory to sing along when that famous chorus comes on. However, its success was both a blessing and a curse, the kind of tune that everyone remembers but that is hard to top, no matter how good the band's subsequent material might have been.

After the band fell apart, and following a handful of "missing years," Keller decided he had to find a permanent job, not just another gig. He'd taken away from his Tommy Tutone experience an interest in music publishing and he eventually talked his way into a job with composer Philip Glass. Both Keller and Glass, each of whom came from very different worlds, were operating on instinct when they met, and their instincts paid off. Keller now runs Glass's management and publishing companies. Admits Keller, "I put the music away to a certain extent to really get something else going on. I wasn't a lawyer, I was a guitar player. And I had to figure it out, work late, weekends, whatever, to get up to speed."

Though this second act in Keller's career has been nothing short of remarkable, something was missing: "I stopped playing when my daughter was born. Didn't touch the guitar for more than a few years, but it was weird and it caught up with me. So I started playing again. In the beginning just loose jams. Most of the guys on the CD are musicians I knew, I'd call them up, we'd go into a studio and we'd just play, that's how it began. Then I started to bring the writing back in." As a songwriter, says Keller, his goal is to "get lucky. You know, you write a bunch of things and some are good and some not so good. So when something good comes out, you just try to get out of the way and not screw it up. The best songs happen from that first blast of inspiration. Basically nothing is cooler to me than a brilliant three-minute pop song. It's soul candy. When I hear something on the radio that works, that I can believe, I just go, shit, that's it. It's always a thrill."

There's a lot to believe in on Sunshine In My Pocket, from the gospel-tinged pledge of love, "I Will," and companion piece, "I've Got You," both featuring stirring harmony work from the Holmes Brothers, to the stark yearning of "Indigo"; from the morning-after optimism of "Brighter Day" to the exuberance of "Love Cannonball," the album's one unabashed rocker. There are echoes of Springsteen circa Tunnel Of Love, traces of the courtly side of Willy DeVille, a little bit of Ry Cooder maybe. But mostly Sunshine In My Pocket is the sound of one artist putting music back into his life, pouring his life into his music.

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