For the last decade or so, Eamon Fogarty has been quietly rearranging the singer-songwriter idiom to suit his singular vision. Singer-songwriter, that clumsy appellation, is the best that the vocabulary of genre offers for approximating what he's up to on I’m an animal now, his stellar new album, but it still falls woefully short. His compositions meander along their own imagined byways rather than hew to standard forms. Their instrumentation has nearly as much to do with chamber music as folk or rock. There are hardly any choruses as we’ve grown accustomed to recognize them: by the time Fogarty reaches a melody’s reprise, he’s traversed so much thematic material in the interim that a new lyric follows more naturally than a repeated one. The songs search, continually, rather than offering tidy resolutions.

You might think of it as somewhat difficult music, in that composing it was surely a challenge, and it never condescends to the idea that listeners need bright signposts to show them when and how to sing along. Yet loving I’m an animal now is quite easy. Singing along, too. Fogarty’s voice is an enviable instrument: full and resonant, with articulate edges, and a rousingly romantic quality that surges particularly in his upper register. When he reaches for a high note, the effect is like that of some rakish protagonist beckoning you to follow as he rounds his tale’s next corner. He has a real way with matching verse to melody: the sort of singer-songwriter who can make a phrase like “junk mail from an alternate reality” sound positively mellifluous, so closely do the syllables hug the turns of the tune.

The lyrics are epic travelogues, quotidian snapshots, and fragments of dreams, all wound together. Fogarty composed his past albums mostly in solitude, but for this one he opened up his process, soliciting and incorporating feedback from loved ones and fellow musicians while the music was in progress. Their advice strengthened his faith in his own intuition, encouraging him to incorporate lines that he’d previously considered as arbitrary placeholders into the songs’ final forms. “It’s almost always coming from the subconscious goo,” he says. “There are phrases where even you as the writer don’t know what they mean, but they mean something. Those are kind of the mysterious core at the center of whatever question you’re trying to sing through.”

One repeated image in the cavalcade of crowded bars, teetering turkey vultures, bright balloons, and Berlin Walls that make up I’m an animal now’s text is that of the camera. It’s an apt motif for an album whose songs often seem concerned, on the surface or deep in the subconscious goo, with the futility of attempting to record and preserve the ineffable detail of lived experience. As Fogarty puts it on the stunning “Aduantas,” a ballad about some young man’s long-ago journey, which recasts the erasures of assimilation as an opportunity to re-enchant history and the everyday: “What I wouldn’t give for just a photograph or two/A pity he could not afford a camera/Even all the colors of a modern-day machine/Could not contain the strangeness of America.”

Fittingly, the music’s particular richness can be tricky to pin down through the lens of references to more familiar artists. There’s a pungently Beatle-esque chord change not long after the line about America in “Aduantas,” which tells you a bit about Fogarty’s harmonic knowhow but less about the way the song actually sounds. Asked for his own lodestars, he offers some unexpected ones. There’s King Crimson, particularly their pastoral psych-pop classic “I Talk to the Wind,” which informs the woodwind arrangements that hover and swirl over several of I’m an animal now’s songs. (Jeff Tobias of Sunwatchers and Modern Nature, who played the woodwinds, is one of a small crew of outside musicians who contributed to an album that Fogarty mostly played himself: the others are Nora Predey of Austin band Large Brush Collection, who plays bass on “Wild Imagination”, and Ryan Jewell, of too many great recent psych-leaning projects to list, on drums.) Robert Wyatt is cited for his commitment to taking his audience seriously, never shying away from musical or political complexity. JJ Cale influenced the economy of instrumentation, which remains delicate and intentional even as it swells toward grand climaxes. The music doesn’t much outwardly resemble Cale’s, but the late, great Tulsa guitarist might have appreciated something in Fogarty’s own nimble playing, whether the fingerpicked strut of “Camera Man” or the jabbing leads of “Which Stars.” To that list of comparisons I might add Grizzly Bear, for their ingenious use of non-rock instruments and their ability to balance songwriting and sound-sculpting without giving either short shrift.

Fogarty stresses what he sees as the smallness of the songs, which feel like stories shared between peers, full of private vocabulary and friendly asides, rather than missives handed down from performer to audience. “The feelings are not intended to fill stadiums,” he says. “I don’t really know what kinds of feelings do fill stadiums, and I don’t know if I want to have those feelings, necessarily. Because I feel like only bad things happen in stadiums.” He pauses for a beat. “Except for maybe Bruce Springsteen concerts.”

I’m an animal now may seem daunting at first, but it will work its way into your heart quickly if you let it. Its elaborate structures and sidelong narratives carry not a whiff of pretension; there’s something hard and honest about them, apparent even when you’re not quite sure what it is this guy’s singing about. Fogarty writes these songs, you sense, because they offer the truest way he’s found of expressing himself.

(Words by Andy Cush)