Ferraby Lionheart draws a winner on ‘Jack of Hearts’

Kevin Bronson on
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It’s harder to keep track of Ferraby Lionheart’s movements than his music.

Born in L.A. and reared in Nashville, the singer-songwriter spent his formative music-making years back in Los Angeles before retreating, after his 2007 Nettwerk debut “Catch the Brass Ring,” to Nashville. He’s spent some time in Sweden, cleared his head on a beach in Ecuador and likes “to drive squares across the country,” he says. “I think it inspires whatever I’m doing.”

Oh, and did we mention he’s now moving back to L.A.?

You don’t need a road map, though, to find the heart of his new album, “The Jack of Hearts.” Its lush guitar and piano ballads reflect a songwriter at the top of his game, using his tender stories and their characters to frame something emotionally larger: the sense that, for all its foibles and frailties, life is an embrace, not a retreat.

“Jack of Hearts” has a different feel and a wider scope than his debut, which was heavy on the folky, introspective quietude.

“I think [the new album] was inspired by the fragility of life, and the desperation – not from a personal place but from an observer’s point of view,” says Lionheart, who made the album largely in a studio he built in his Nashville house. “It doesn’t come from a place of sadness. It’s more acknowledging the transition of being alive, and moving on, and the celebration of that.”

The man born Ferraby Lizarraga clearly relishes his physical transitions – “I don’t tour a lot, but I don’t like to stay in one place,” he says.

He felt that Los Angeles – where he fronted the rock band Telecast before going solo and making an album and an EP – had run its course after “Catch the Brass Ring.” “I was starting to feel a little restless with my situations here,” he says. He relocated to Nashville and even spent time in Sweden after becoming smitten by the idea while doing a telephone interviewer with a Stockholm journalist.

But it’s clear from “The Jack of Hearts” (due out Tuesday via Thirty Tigers) that, for Lionheart, home is wherever the stories are. “Harry and Bess” is a tale revolving around a Harry Houdini legend that says his wife Bess passed him the key to a pair of supposedly inescapable handcuffs via a kiss. “Arkansas” is a about a friend who, at age 18, went in search of her real father. And “Holdin’ Me Back” is simply about “a young gal who did a number on me.”

Lionheart is coming back to Silver Lake environs because he didn’t find “the same kind of community in Nashville,” he says. “I guess I developed deeper relationships with people here.”

||| Live: Ferraby Lionheart performs tonight at the Bootleg Theater, supported by the Romany Rye and Nicole Simone.