"To hear the music of John Brannen is to hear the music of the South," observes the Charleston, South Carolina Post and Courier. To hear his music is to also visit the kudzu-draped locales below the Mason-Dixon Line as well as meet the distinctive characters to be found throughout the region, and travel along on Brannen's actual and emotional journeys as a dyed-in-the-cotton son of the South. That's because Brannen's songs, style and voice resonate with the essence of life along the East Coast of the American Southern states in much the same way, as reviewers have noted, that fellow artists like Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Seger, John Mellencamp and Steve Earle have captured their slices of real life from their regions across the nation.

Brannen is "one of those universal rockers whose road-weary songs and hard-bitten heroics have made him an unflappable journeyman along the rock ’n’ roll highway," as syndicated reviewer Lee Zimmerman aptly puts it. During his musical travels, Brannen has enjoyed a Top 20 song, forged an ongoing writing collaboration with hitmaker Jack Tempchin (known for his work with The Eagles and Glenn Frey), "got rock and roll star lessons from Joe Walsh," as he tells it, and recorded and toured with some of the most respected American Southern musicians. He has earned his legend, associations and rave reviews through his gift for expressing universal stories and feelings in the lingua fraca of the South.

"The South is the crossroads and the synthesis of the Western world," Brannen observes. "All the great characteristics of existence are here, from the ugliness, tragedy, sorrow and depravity to the beauty, romance, comedy and nobility." That breadth of human experience is found on Twilight Tattoo, his second release for Sly Dog Records and fifth album overall. With a dozen evocative numbers ranging from feisty rockers to soaring ballads, it was produced by David Z, whose wide-ranging work with artists like Prince, Fine Young Cannibals, Buddy Guy, Gov't Mule, Kenny Wayne Shepherd and Big Head Todd & The Monsters made him perfectly suited to capture Brannen's sound, which he describes as "eclectic Southern rock with soul and R&B influences." Some of the musicians on Twilight Tattoo include guitarists Jack Holder and Duane Jarvis, keyboardist Giles Reaves, bassist David Smith and drummer Tom Hambridge. Like such other writers as Thomas Wolfe, William Faulkner, Robbie Robertson and Lucinda Williams – who duets with Brannen on "A Cut So Deep" for the new CD – Brannen has a compelling knack for detailing the Southern sense of time and place and the personalities that reside there in a way that makes them feel tangible and authentic. And then he invests them with an electric rock 'n' roll power and delivers them in a voice that mixes grit and beauty with combustible firepower.

It's a gift that Brannen comes by naturally if not genetically, hailing from a family whose Southern heritage stretches back to before the American Revolution (his ninth great-grandfather was an early governor of South Carolina). Raised in Charleston, he was exposed to a wide range of music early on by his mother and had a love of poetry imbued in his soul by a grandfather "who knew all the classics and could recite them off the top of his head."

Although he started singing with a band in high school, from the age of 13 on, surfing was Brannen's passion, taking him to Hawaii and the West Indies during his late teen and young adult years that he spent as a self-described "adventurer." Then one night his musician friends Bob Jones and Jack Williams invited him to join them and three girls for a party on the beach. "Bob started singing these songs that he had written with this guy he was in a band with named Randall Bramblett" (later known for his work in the group Sea Level and with artists like Robertson, Steve Winwood and Gregg Allman). "The songs were these imaginative, post-apocalyptic Southern pieces – very poetic and soulful and melodic. It was something I really connected with in a timeless fashion, and that evening set me to songwriting in a big way."

About to head back to Hawaii to surf the big waves again, Brannen was invited to ride along to the West Coast with Williams and his band as they gigged their way across the country. "He was a phenomenal guitar player who he could literally play every song that anybody had ever written, whether it was Hoagy Carmichael, Leiber & Stoller or Crosby, Stills & Nash. By the time we crossed the Mississippi, I was playing bass with him. Once we hit Los Angeles, instead of flying on to Hawaii, I flew back to Charleston and started a band."

Soon he was touring the Eastern Seaboard from Virginia to Florida, packing out clubs along the coast playing his original songs to vacationers, locals and beach bums and bunnies, developing a strong sense of that mise en scene in his writing and musical style. It was a milieu suffused with a certain magic and romanticism for both Brannen and his fans. "A lot of the places I played didn't even have windows but just screens. They'd lift these big plywood planks covering the screens to let to ocean breeze flow through.

"It was the most beautiful time in a lot of people's lives," Brannen recalls of the beach circuit he played. "For a lot of people, that would be as beautiful as their lives would be. The girls were as sexy and attractive as they ever were. And the guys would be the best they would be in their lives."

Brannen's grassroots popularity prompted music business types to start sniffing around. "They had to almost literally drag me kicking and screaming into the industry," Brannen explains. "I had my own little world. What would I want to do that for?" But after demo sessions in Muscle Shoals, Alabama and New York City, a few false starts at record deals, and then being flown out to gigs around the country by Joe Walsh, who wanted to produce him, Brannen finally signed on the dotted line with the Capitol-distributed label Apache Records.

His 1988 debut, Mystery Street, was lauded by Billboard as "a panoramic rock 'n' roll dreamscape of emotions." It was recorded with players like guitarist Warner Hodges (of Jason & The Scorchers) and keyboard player as well as co-writer Tom Gray (who wrote the hit "Money Changes Everything" with his band The Brains), who were also the core of Brannen's touring band, which also included guitarist Andy York (now with John Mellencamp) and bassist Keith Christopher (the original bass player with the Georgia Satellites, now a member of The Yayhoos). The album's first single, "Desolation Angel" reached No. 16 on the national charts and even hit No. 1 in a number of major markets like Los Angeles, and its video was tapped as an MTV "Hip Clip."

But then Apache dissolved after the company lost its deal with Capitol. After a handshake deal with another major label slipped away, Brannen cut a second album on his own that was then picked up by Mercury Records in Nashville. The clip for the single "Moonlight and Magnolias" hit VH1's Top 10, and the label tried to break Brannen as a country artist on a three-act tour of its new acts with Toby Keith and Shania Twain. But he was, to flip the phrase, a round peg that didn't quite fit Music City's very square hole.

"Suddenly I was in the country music business, which was kind of funny," Brannen observes. "I was supposed to be the outlaw guy because I wasn't from the country music business." And just as he was about to record a follow-up album, an executive shake-up at the label left Brannen out on his own again (and quite relieved to be so).

Undaunted by the travails of dealing with the music business, "I decided, hell, I'm just going to go make a record that has no regard for any format whatsoever" – Scarecrow, which only saw official release in Europe. Then he finally found a welcome home when the Detroit-based independent label Sly Dog signed him up and released The Good Thief in 2004.

Hailed as "an original hybrid" (No Depression) and "versatile and rewarding" (Billboard), the album was co-produced by master guitarist Pete Carr (who started his career in The Hour Glass with Duane and Gregg Allman and went on to work with Bob Seger, Paul Simon, Rod Stewart, Willie Nelson and other stars), and featured such A list players as bassist Willie Weeks (whose credits include work with The Rolling Stones, David Bowie, Stevie Wonder, Gregg Allman, Rod Stewart and a host of other stars) and keyboard player Clayton Ivy (who has played with R&B greats like Clarence Carter, Johnnie Taylor and Millie Jackson). Once again, reviewers cited America's top rock songwriters as a reference for Brannen's command of writing about the cultural landscape of the South, adding such names as John Hiatt, Chris Isaak and – for some of Brannen's more stirring vocal moments – Roy Orbison to their comparisons.

Now Twilight Tattoo finds Brannen once again applying his keen songwriter's eye to his Southern homeland, albeit this time from a different vector after moving to Asheville in the North Carolina mountains (which he recounts in the album's vibrant closing grace note, "The Mountain"). "I used to like to say that my songs are where Shakespeare meets Freud in the swamp, but this is where Shakespeare meets Freud in the mountains," Brannen explains. "There's this sense you get up here where you can look back and almost see the ocean."

The set starts with a rabble-rousing glance towards his past on "Just Restless" – "I've been that guy on and off for too many years," Brannen admits with a chuckle – and chronicles some of his own story on such emotionally-stirring numbers as "Almost Love," "A Cut So Deep" and "Rain." He takes listeners on a rocking trot along "Heartbreak Ridge," finds profound metaphorical power in the elemental act of "Goin' Fishin'," and introduces us to vividly quintessential Blue Ridge Mountain characters in "Black Mountain Dandy" and "Jericho Road."

And then there's the title track – "a song I had to write," says Brannen – and its look at the people of the current war zone through the eyes of a rank and file Southern guy in the service. "In the modern world, war's devastation is on civilians more than soldiers, and it's something I just couldn't ignore.”

"I wanted to make a record that was a little more fun and made one equally as dark, which is the way it is with me," explains Brannen. Because ultimately his well-grounded sense of place and musical style permeates whatever he writes. "I'm a Southern American artist. I feel capable of making a bluegrass record and I feel capable of making a jazz record. But what I do is out of the essence of rock 'n' roll with soul and blues influences."

For Brannen, it's all about following his muse through the Southern heartland to wherever it takes him. "It's a big old house that's fraught with unknown rooms. You go down a hall and find a door that will open and explore what's in there and see what you get. And then get out alive," he adds with a laugh.

"I just try to stay in favor with the muse," Brannen concludes. "That's what it's all about."