POP FROM THE GROUND UP

Enter Levi Ray. At 22, he's a recording industry graduate living in Nashville and part-timing downtown as a cook at The Whiskey Kitchen.

When he's not writing era- and genre-fusion masterpieces or hand building his own stage-lights from Mason jars and planks of cedar, he's a prodigious, soul-pop guitar-for-hire, and he's here to work.

"I'm motivated by what I want to hear," he enthuses, tuning a sweat-faded Fender Telecaster through a small and gritty combo amp, "and a lot of what's called pop today doesn't move me."

Ray picked up the guitar in his early high-school years, quickly mastering classic rock, pop and R&B standards, while writing his own music. "You've got to know all the favorites: the guitar-god solos, all the riffs," he says over a blistering fit of finger-tapped, sweep-picked arpeggios.

But he says his hardest-struck chords have always been from older generations of pop artists. "You can't find a top-40 song without some remnant of Marvin Gaye, or song structures going back to Motown."

To many a musician's dismay, the role of the electric guitar as a seminal ingredient for top-40 radio hits has fallen to the wayside. Lone-ranger guitarists like John Mayer, or virtuosic sidemen such as John Frusciante of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, are becoming a rare breed. Even less likely are popular guitarists or licks that are as funk or soul-infused like the love-rockers of Maroon 5.

"I think people want an interactive experience – a real-life performance," Ray muses. "Real people actually playing the music you're hearing is more human and accessible than some of the technology that does a lot of mainstream pop's legwork." He leans into the distorted howl sparking from the amplifier he enforces with a pinched brow. Ray's in the midst of refining a set list of new material from an EP he's launching around the Nashville hotspot venues and Murfreesboro house-show circuits.

It's a gamble being self-made, but he's got the playing chops, the attitude, the voice, the ethic, engineering and production savvy, as well as an economic poise and understanding of the biz. He says majoring in the recording industry made him dangerous.

"I want to be a triple threat. Knowing my way around the faces of the industry helps me as an artist set myself up in the right directions," he says.

Levi records and produces all his songs, after writing and performing them.

He comes to his successes honestly, marketing his shows, honing his band, lighting and running sound for the throngs populating living room and barroom venues. But with as many artists that are trying to break into the stardom stratosphere, he hopes the modern pop formula will consider the homegrown.

"I don't purposefully go against the grain– I listen to the grain, I believe in it," he confesses. "I just think it needs to be tilled once in a while."