Talk for a few minutes with Van Hunt and you know why he has a devout following and can guess why his relationship with one record company fell apart. Hunt, who plays Tipitina’s Thursday night, has developed a distinctive, funky sound that draws as much from the history of glam rock and punk as it does from psychedelic R&B, and it’s very clear he does things his way for his reasons.

“I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t trying to disrupt whatever anyone has been expecting,” Hunt says on the phone. “But it all starts with me. I’m trying to surprise myself, too. I do enjoy the thought of wondering what people will think when they hear this, but only because I get so excited to hear the music. All of this, simply put, is just me trying to recreate the excitement that I heard when I first listened to Thelonious Monk or Parliament-Funkadelic.”

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKlXQzl_Ca0[/youtube]

Hunt first got attention with the release of his self-titled debut album in 2004. At the time, “Dust” and “Down Here in Hell (with You)” were part of a moment when a handful of artists came out sounding like the sons of Sly and the Family Stone. In fact, he won a Grammy in 2007 for his duet with Joss Stone on a cover of “Family Affair”, but the follow-up to Van Hunt, 2006’s On the Jungle Floor showed that he had other muses, most unexpectedly when he covered “No Sense of Crime,” a song first recorded by Iggy Pop and James Williamson for Kill City. The songs were not as warm and immediately evocative of classic R&B as on his debut, instead bringing to mind Prince at his more ornate. Hunt acknowledges Prince as an influence, but his music sounds more like they’re fellow travelers processing similar inspirations in similar ways.

“I generally start with a sound that I really want to have,” Hunt says. “I know it’s hard to imagine, but that sound in my head has never changed; I’ve looked at some of the demos that I did when I was 23, and that sound has never changed. I’ve been going for the same thing, but each step along the way, I found something that gives me a tool to get closer to where I’m going. At first it was Thelonious Monk, then Prince and then Sly, then Parliament-Funkadelic, and then even Bach and the Stooges. Each time I get closer, it’s like, ‘Okay, I need this piece.’ The last time it was the Stooges and then Bowie, and the Detroit sound, if you will, between the Stooges and MC5, an old band called Death, and even the Motown sound, which is kind of a scratchy sound. Little things that form the sounds in my head, I start with that, and I start with a whole set of lyrics and one-liners that I’ve been collecting, and I go from there.”

A corporate restructuring moved Hunt from Capitol to Blue Note, but after sending out promo advances of his next album, Popular, the label declined to release it in 2008 and agreed to part ways with Hunt. “I don’t think I understood that they wanted a particular sound,” he told Creative Loafing. “I think I could have made a record that would have made them more comfortable doing what they do—which is sell records.” It’s a dense album that wanders at times, but “Turn My TV On,” “Ur Personal Army,” “The Lowest 1 of My Desires” and the beautiful ballad “There’s Never a G’time to Say G’bye” all merit a better fate than a record company’s vault. Unfortunately, Hunt doesn’t expect to be able to buy the masters from Blue Note, so the only way to hear the songs is to find it through more nefarious means online.

That unscheduled interruption in his release schedule led to an unplanned four year virtual absence from recording. After the initial pain of losing an album, Hunt found the gap hard to deal with.

“I thought I’d feel a little more relief, a little more peaceful about that,” he says. “But I don’t, to be honest. The stress of putting a record together is so great that once you’re done, that stress goes away, and that’s the time for an artist where all that suppressed creativity starts to overwhelm you. While some people may take their time to take a vacation, I’m ready to write again.”

He kept coming up with song ideas whether he wanted them or not. “The minute I finished the record I was driving my lady crazy with all these little ideas. She’s like, ‘Can’t we at least get to bed together?’”

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkmLM7F739w[/youtube]

In the interim between Popular and his new album, What Were You Hoping For? (a title that jams an elbow solidly in Blue Note’s ribs), he released Use in Case of Emergency—an odds and ends collection—on his own in 2008. Earlier this year, he released the song “June” as a free mp3 download. The psychedelic pop tune builds from a percussion loop and upright bass to a swirl of voices and wobbling keyboard parts that embroider and test an elegantly simple melody. The song doesn’t appear on the new album, though.

“Once I completed the demo, my team felt like the record was different enough to warrant a bridge between what I’ve done before and what I’m doing now,” Hunt says. “That was one of the songs I chose to lure people that may prefer what I’ve done before to what I’m doing now, but at least give them an olive branch.”

He followed “June” with “Eyes like Pearls,” a guitar-heavy funk-rock track that is found on the album. What Were You Hoping For? leans heavily on Hunt’s guitar, particularly on the frantic “Watching You Go Crazy is Driving Me Insane.” His metallic, deeply reverb lead lines give way to a drum, high-hat and bass verse on “Designer Jeans,” and his guitar almost sounds like a ukulele on “Falls (Violet).” An emphasis on texture and the right sound for the moment has been a defining characteristic of Hunt’s music after his debut.

“The music—while I hear it in my head, it also has a picture to it,” he says. “If I had to describe it, it’s like a set of concrete steps that lead up to this layer of clouds, like atonal clouds, if you will, with this metal spaceship sticking out of the clouds. That’s essentially what I see—the combination of elements. You have the steps of concrete rising, the soft clouds that are kind of difficult to describe, that’s why they’re like atonal. And the metal spaceship, which is the hard, the rhythm that I hear. I’m always going for that particular set of ingredients.”

Considering how integral the specific sounds are to Hunt’s songs, you’d expect much of the writing to be done in the studio, but with the exception of specific bits such as the breakdown in the middle of “North Hollywood” on the new album, he says he comes in with the songs in his head. And he doesn’t work the songs up in a home studio, either. “Sometimes I’ll put a little motif down on a recorder or write it down on some paper, but my mentors taught me that if you leave it in your head, the good ones will come back,” he says. “It’s fun to me; it’s like daydreaming.”

One of Hunt’s mentors is Randy Jackson of American Idol fame, and the two would seem like an odd couple. Hunt is very clearly following a personal musical vision, while American Idol seems to groom singers for the broadest, most conventional vision.

“That’s the duality in Randy and part of what makes him a very unique individual to me,” Hunt says. “If you get to know him, you find out that his favorite artist is John Coltrane, and he could sit down and talk to you about every record, every song, he could talk to you about his solos. It’s something that he grew up with as a musician, and when you mention artistry to him, that’s where he goes—to someone who makes that kind of sacrifice for themselves but also for the culture at large.

“He respects that about my choices. At the same time, there’s the business, which he also has a great mind for, and he understands that if you’re going to be successful in business, it’s going to be outside of an isolated view point. It’s something that’s going to need many people to jump on board, and if you’re going to do that, that means you’re going to have to smooth the edges of your presentation. He completely gets that side as well and we’ve had that conversation many times. He lays it out for me and says, ‘Look, if you make these choices, this is what you can expect.’ He’s totally comfortable with me being who I am and I appreciate that.”

Because of the textural and musical complexity of his music, Hunt doesn’t worry too much about trying to faithfully reproduce it live.

“I have to be coerced to recreate the album live,” he says. “I view it as two different entities; I enjoy just going to the stage and playing. I figure a good song is a good song; if anybody wanted to hear me play the record, they’d just play the record. Actually, it’s most difficult to recreate the record. You would have to be sequencing your parts or bringing out the entire studio with you to recreate the sound of the record, unless you’re a band that plays everything live in the studio.”

That means that some songs are more likely to appear in a set list than others.

“The things that are more machine driven, specifically drum machine driven, are more difficult [to play live] because the minute you have to try and do something with the machine on stage, it locks the whole band into a rhythm, and there’s less freedom. I’ve tried that, but to be honest it just doesn’t work. Generally those songs don’t get played live unless I do them in a completely different manner. It’s difficult. A lot of artists, like Peaches for instance, her album’s primarily all drum machine. That’s her show, and she’s built the show around the drum machine and the sequencer, and it’s a pretty cool show, but my records tend to have a blend of percussion—old African drums, a trap set, and some machine drums, and what I try to do is bring four or five players together and we play the songs that lend themselves to what those four or five players’ strengths are.

One of Hunt’s highest profile live performances was a part of a tribute to Sly and the Family Stone in 2007. Sly Stone was the subject of conversation the next day for his eccentric performance, hovering over his keyboard in a silver duster and a bleached blonde Mohawk during “I Want to Take You Higher.” His voice could briefly be heard before being drowned out by all the other vocal firepower onstage. He keyed a few chords before waving to the crowd and walking offstage before the song was over.

“I can’t really say much other than to see him at rehearsal was the highlight for me, along with getting a Grammy,” Hunt says. “But watching this guy come in who had made all this music that was special to me was amazing. His ‘behavior’ on stage was not news to me. The same thing he did on the show he did in rehearsal—he came out, he jumped on stage, played the same, and jumped off, and left.

“He was supposed to play but he had injured his hand in a motorcycle accident, so he actually couldn’t play at all. But they left the keyboard up there—I think he felt more comfortable with the keyboard up there, but he was singing.”

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mtuKDmA3C4[/youtube]

Van Hunt and Empress Hotel play Tipitina’s Thursday night at 9 p.m. Tickets are on sale now.