E-Mail This Article to a Friend Reality bites The stark folk tales of Damien Jurado BY MICHAEL ALAN GOLDBERG

Like short-story writers and poets, singer-songwriters — no matter how "confessional" they purport to be — often find themselves hunting for new sources of inspiration, whether from a snippet of overheard conversation at a bar or the headlines of the daily paper. After all, there’s only so much one can take from one’s own life, regardless of how unusual it may be, before the well runs dry. Damien Jurado is a Seattle native whose recording career began almost a decade ago when the brand of quiet introspection he had cultivated on a series of self-released tapes coincided with Sub Pop’s redefinition of itself as more than a grunge label. His confessional songwriting has, over time, given way to an ongoing search for inspiration from outside sources — so much so that in 2000 he pieced together an album, Postcards and Audio Letters (Up), from forgotten tapes scavenged from thrift-store answering machines and tape players.

More recently, Jurado has found himself drawn to a very specific section of the daily paper. "I read the obituaries all the time," he chuckles over the phone. "I’m fascinated by how life is so short. Here’s this person who lived this life, and as I read it, I get images in my head: their graduation, their first child, where they lived. I picture all that stuff. It’s such an open door, and it tends to be a good help to my songwriting."

That might seem a bit morbid. But Jurado’s view of the obits is anything but one-dimensional. And his latest CD, Where Shall You Take Me? (Secretly Canadian), is filled with as much life as death. "I’m fascinated by birth, too. I watched my own son being born. It’s just really interesting to consider the whole process of checkin’ in and checkin’ out of life’s motel."

On Where Shall You Take Me?, the now 30-year-old songwriter’s affinity for skeletal verses and his minimalist approach to finding the right few words to describe a particular character or situation belie the emotional weight and the multiple layers of meaning in each of the disc’s 10 tracks, as do the inevitably ambiguous resolutions. In "Amateur Night," he spins a creepy yarn about a homicidal nudie photographer who shrugs off his wicked blood lust as nothing more than a "bad habit," a twist that only heightens the banality of the song’s evil. The 19-year-old beauty of "Abilene" is the object of an older man’s obsessive desire; the lyrics suggest an end to their romance that is both blissful and a tragic. In "Intoxicated Hands," it’s the woman who gets the man in the song drunk, only to take advantage of him before casting him out the next morning. "They’re sort of like episodes of Quantum Leap," Jurado explains. "I’m kind of this person that goes in and out of lives and gives you snippets of this and that."

The album’s sparse and spectral folk shadings give an ominous but never overbearing tone to each track. Gentle acoustic guitars, lilting piano melodies, and muted percussion mingle modestly — it’s as if the album had been recorded late at night with a baby sleeping in the next room. That restrained quality can be soothing on easygoing tunes like "Matinee" and "Window"; on a darker track like "Amateur Night," it can amplify the tension. Either way, the vivid character portraits stand out in stark relief to the quietude of the folkish backdrop.

Like Richard Buckner and Chris Whitley — two other purveyors of dark folk tales — Jurado remains a cult artist with a small but loyal following. Indeed, he’s still struck by how deeply songs like "Amateur Night" and releases like Where Shall You Take Me? have affected his fans. "Some of the e-mails I get are really heavy and intense. I have to remember that I now occupy a position similar to the one other musicians held for me years ago, when I could put on a Neil Young record and it would mean so much to me. Now that I’m on the other side of the fence, I dunno . . . when it first started happening, it was a bit much."

And he’s developed some interesting relationships that way. "A lot of the people who have written me I still keep in contact with. It’s weird, though, like, not that I’m a therapist or anything, but am I breaking some sort of rule in the relationship between a songwriter and his audience? I’ve been trying so hard these days to keep a wall between my personal life and my art, and I’m finding the two are colliding head-on. But it’s been easier to deal with some of the stuff I’ve gone through in my life because of the songs I’ve written, so I guess my hope would just be that the people listening to it feel the same thing."