Adam Levy has two passports full of stamps and visas from his travels playing guitar with Norah Jones’ Handsome Band, an enviable gig that he gave up in 2007 to follow his own path as a songwriter and singer. He released two CDs under his own name while still in Jones’ band and a third, Washing Day, not long after he left. By the end of 2009 though, Levy realized he hadn’t written any songs in quite a while.

He called it a “crisis of confidence.” The reality however, wasn’t so much about confidence in his abilities as it was about finding a meaningful path through unbearable grief.

In order to focus he devised a plan—to write a song a week—and then threw out the same challenge to several songwriter friends. Levy would come up with a title, perhaps based on a newspaper headline, an interesting phrase, or a sign and send it via email to members of this small group he dubbed The Song Club, which included Tony Furtado, Ari Hest, Vienna Teng and others.

He spent the first few months of 2010 writing and soon had more than 25 songs. Though he hadn’t originally planned to make a record, it became apparent that recording these songs was the only thing he could do.

This is the genesis of his stunning new CD The Heart Collector, an intimate collection of 13 acoustic songs, rich in lyrical detail and laced with lush string arrangements and accents of accordion, vibraphone, dobro, bass harmonica, Marxophone and pump organ.

Considering the events of Levy’s life the preceding three years, The Heart Collector might have taken on a decidedly darker tone. In late 2006, while he was making Washing Day in New York, a chance meeting in the coffee shop across the street from the studio changed his life. Her name was Mia Jarlov, a grad student from Denmark, who had recently moved to New York from Marbella, Spain.

“I knew right away she was special,” Levy recalls. The two became friends, and then dated through the fall, taking it slow. After the holidays that year, Mia returned from a trip home to Denmark with difficult news.

Unbeknownst to Levy, Mia had been previously diagnosed with ocular melanoma, an extremely rare type of cancer that starts behind the eye. Though she had lost one eye already to the disease, she had been in good health, but during her trip home, doctors discovered the cancer was back and had spread. She told Adam about her condition and that she’d understand if he wanted to break off the relationship.

“I was so in love with her, I couldn’t imagine leaving,” Levy says. The relationship grew closer, even as the cancer progressed. They married in January 2009 and enjoyed “a good couple of months,” until Mia’s health declined irreversibly in April and she passed away in May.

After her death, Levy found himself in limbo. He travelled to Marbella and met her friends. He continued to play gigs. But he couldn’t bring himself to write.

“I can stay stuck in the past or I can do the things that make me feel alive and creative,” he remembers thinking at the time. “I needed to go forward and keep living.” Levy wrote several songs inspired by his wife but recorded only a couple for the CD. “I wanted Mia to be present on this record, but not by dealing openly with her death.”

To bring the songs on The Heart Collector to life, Levy recruited his friend, producer and engineer Mark Orton, with whom Levy had previously worked on a project for Hot Club of San Francisco. They made the disc over a 10-day stretch at Orton’s Camp Watertown Studios just outside Portland, Oregon.

The Heart Collector meanders through musical landscapes peppered with jazz, folk, blues and Americana, the perfect backdrop for Levy’s masterful storytelling and the eccentric characters who populate his songs, from the old troubadour pondering his youth on “This is The Sound,” to the imaginary man who lives in an Edvard Munch painting in “Painting By Numbers.”

Other tunes include “Promise To California,” the title taken from a Walt Whitman poem, evokes California’s golden age of the great singer-songwriters of the 70s, while on the title track Levy creates a Raymond Chandler-esque film noir soundtrack, based on a character he first encountered in the Sam Phillips song “Edge Of The World.” On “Promised Land,” a man recalls childhood visits to his grandparent’s house, a place where, like Levy, he first became “entranced by music and the power of song.”

Adam Levy was born and raised in suburban Los Angeles and found musical inspiration from his grandfather George Wyle, a pianist and arranger who co-wrote the opening theme to the iconic 60s television show, “Gilligan’s Island,” and the Christmas song, “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year.” He tried clarinet and piano before finding his groove on guitar and had a successful career as a sideman before he joined Jones’ band. Levy came late to songwriting however, after Jones playfully challenged band members to write new material while they were touring the Southwest in 2002. Levy wrote two songs on that trip that Jones later recorded, “In the Morning” and “Moon Song.”

He didn’t sing his own songs until 2005, after he participated in a songwriting retreat hosted by Chris Difford, of Squeeze. “I was paired up with different writers every day,” Levy recalls. “We had to write together, and perform the new songs each night. It was daunting, but it made me realize that a lot of writing is simply getting it done and that songs are hanging thick in the air everywhere, that performing my songs wasn’t so scary and that, for better or worse, nobody can sing my songs like me.

As a singer-songwriter, Levy draws inspiration from a long list of musical heroes including Chris Whitley, the Beatles, Hank Williams, Richard Julian, Elvis Costello, Nick Lowe, Sam Phillips, Jill Sobule, Loudon Wainwright III, Tom Waits, Gillian Welch, XTC, and Neko Case.

His guitar work can be heard on records by Norah Jones, Amos Lee, Tracy Chapman, Sex Mob, Hot Club of San Francisco and others.

Levy has called Los Angeles, San Francisco and New Orleans home and currently resides in Manhattan.
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