Take a visit to Luke’s Garage, Delicate Steve’s latest album, and you’ll discover a place where sparks of creativity fly in all directions, where melodies splatter the walls like brightly hued paint, where no idea is too simple, too ingenuous, too full of childlike wonder. The L.A.-via-Jersey guitarist born Steve Marion, whose credits include session work for Amen Dunes, Paul Simon, and Deradoorian, had no grand plan for making it: he would simply book some time at a friend’s studio, hunker down, and play. He’s always allowed intuition to guide him, composing his jubilantly tuneful instrumentals as he records them, but this time, he felt freer than ever to “keep the seams showing, and don’t polish everything, and keep it raw, and alive, and electric-feeling,” he says. He chose the title, Luke’s Garage, as a tribute to his pal and sometime collaborator Luke Temple, but also for the anything-goes adolescent innocence it conjured: the feeling of heading over to a buddy’s house, turning up the amps, and creating your own world. In the world of Luke’s Garage, a passage of music that feels like a sketch in progress might open into a hook so finely wrought, so obviously right, that you have a hard time believing you haven’t heard it before. The two passages may in fact be one and the same. There are songs that feel destined to soundtrack memories of windows-down road trips, and those more suited to moments of hushed intimacy. A shadowy synth-pop excursion (“Light of the World”) veers into a candlelit soul ballad (“Shall Be Free”); a chugging garage-rocker (the title track, naturally) sets up an unexpected detour into slinky disco (“There Goes My Baby”). Delicate Steve’s unmistakable sensibility, his tone airy yet tactile, his lines full of poignant bends and whimsical asides, is a benevolent guide through the ever-shifting landscape, keeping a steady hand on the wheel no matter the surroundings. He has little interest in showing off, focusing instead on clarity, simplicity, and directness—more like an openhearted pop songwriter than a look-what-I-can-do shredder. Marion played every instrument on Luke’s Garage himself—guitars, drums, keys, bass—which heightens its homespun charm. The album’s sense of music as a colorful playground for exploration may remind you of Paul McCartney’s early solo work, made at a time when he was shrugging off the weight of expectation and digging into his own idiosyncrasy, tinkering alone until he found a sound that made him feel and trusting it would do the same for others. As with the McCartney, this record’s air of easy spontaneity belies serious craftsmanship and care: the exuberantly arcing melody of “We’ll Be Friends” and the quietly hopeful one of “Die With It” didn’t just come out of thin air, no matter how natural or even preordained they may seem. To hear Marion tell it, the audible joy in his music isn’t some affect he’s choosing to put on, but an honest expression of his own delight and relief when he finally finds the right note, the right rhythm. The prevailing mood of Luke’s Garage is one of discovery, because you’re hearing Marion discover the music himself. Another important reference point is Donuts, the classic swan song by the late Detroit hip-hop legend J Dilla, one of Marion’s favorite albums. That may be a surprising inspiration for an instrumental guitar record, but it makes sense as soon as you hear Luke’s Garage, the way it feels both offhanded and profound, its deep beauty inextricable from its casual presentation. Marion’s love for Dilla is also evident in the way he treats each track as a little universe with its own parameters, its own language and laws of physics. And in the way he flicks through them as if he’s auditioning a bin full of records for a last-minute DJ set, giving each one whatever space it needs to develop and lingering for not a second longer than that. This collage-like presentation of Luke’s Garage keeps Delicate Steve’s guitar-centric instrumentals firmly situated in the present, in subtle conversation with sample-based and electronic music even though Marion composed it entirely on live instruments. In a sense, Luke’s Garage is not “guitar music” at all, but a fizzy, brightly colored pop record that just happens to feature the guitar as its lead voice. Luke’s Garage may seem at first like a low-key collection, and in some ways it is. Don’t let that fool you into thinking it isn’t deep. Music gets asked to be a lot of things these days: a cure for what ails you, or for society itself. Luke’s Garage is neither of those things, nor does it attempt to be. It offers a simple but powerful proposition instead: in its very looseness, its embrace of happenstance, its irrepressible groove, and its joyful refusal to be anything other than itself, it’ll leave you feeling just a little freer than you did before you pressed play. That’s more than enough.

Like if St. Vincent and Sondheim went to Waffle House to split hashbrowns after seeing the traveling circus' final performance